Or, one better... draw the potentially valid modifiers at around 25%
opacity. No new glyphs to inform users about; I imagine that a naive
user would pick up on it right away. And it's always going to work
because menu alternates can only be defined for menus that share a
common shortcut.
In fact, that would make a great haxie.
--Kyle Sluder
On 10/31/07, Kyle Sluder <email@hidden> wrote:
> Chris,
>
> Glad to see that you're ahead of the game. I personally will never
> use menu alternates, because I never have enough menu items to warrant
> the space-saving, but I understand what you're talking about when you
> say 200+ menu items. MS Word is a good candidate for such a cleanup
> as well.
>
> Well, I imagine that if there's a long-outstanding request, that my
> filing a bug won't do much good. But in any event, I think using the
> chevron from the toolbar would be a good indicator. When you click
> it, you get a submenu with all of the alternates spelled out. Or
> maybe do what Photoshop CS3 does and color the item differently.
> There has to be some way of doing it that's intuitive.
>
> --Kyle Sluder
>
> On 10/31/07, Chris Espinosa <email@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > On Oct 31, 2007, at 12:03 PM, Kyle Sluder wrote:
> >
> > > That's precisely why I think menu alternates are a very bad idea.
> > > Since the toolbar is taking up precious space, and can be turned off
> > > at any time, I expect the menu bar to hold every action I can perform
> > > at any given moment. The fact that there's no indication that if I
> > > hold down a certain arcane combination of modifier keys I *might* just
> > > find the functionality I'm looking for is really disconcerting to me.
> > > The new Help menu goes some ways to alleviating this problem, but I
> > > still think it would be nice to have some sort of visual indication
> > > that a menu item has alternates.
> >
> > We work very hard to balance the accessable power for the expert with
> > clear orientation and simplicity for the new Xcode user. It had
> > become very clear that Xcode had a daunting number of confusing and
> > obscure menu items, and we eliminated about 20% of them in Xcode 3.0.
> >
> > We also wish that the Mac OS X alternate menu mechanism had better
> > techniques for discoverability (other than popping the menu and
> > cycling through all 8 combinations of metakeys) and there is a
> > longstanding request to the HI group that we've dogpiled on. We hope
> > this can be resolved to the benefit of all applications that have more
> > functionality than fits comfortably in 200+ menu items.
> >
> > Chris
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