Re: services
Re: services
- Subject: Re: services
- From: "Sven-S. Porst" <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2002 19:48:24 +0100
Ondra,
>
SSP> Talking about the future and more applications offering services, having
>
SSP> the ability to switch some of them off would be neat.
>
>
Just like it always was in NeXTStep!
Too bad that Apple left it out - but perhaps there's hope then :)
>
SSP> IMHO, ideally services would be provided in a contextual menu and only
>
SSP> display the items that actually work.
>
>
I beg to disagree here. The menu should *not* change, ie. whenever
>
reasonably possible, the items should always stay on the same position.
I should've been more clear here and added an 'additionally' here. To me,
Services seem like something that is dependent on the context and would
fit well into contextual menus. But as far as I can tell, contextual
menus _should_ change with the context and only provide the commands that
are actually applicable in the given situation (particularly avoiding
those frustrating active submenus in the Services menu that only contain
inactive items...). However, I do agree that the Services menu itself
should stay in the menu bar as well, as probably there shouldn't be any
commands available through contextual menus only anyway.
In particualar I agree with your point that menus should neither move or
change. Sadly Apple seems to disagree strongly with that - considering
the fact that they thought it's clever to make the leftmost menu be the
one that has a different width in every application and the fact that the
appearance of the Services menu depends on the language of the current
application. So much for the research on 'motoric memory' that was
allegedly used for designing the 'Classic' MacOS.
>
That is exactly what the current Services system -- took from NeXTStep --
>
does: when the application starts, it is determined which Services
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_might_ be useable in it; for them, the appropriate menu items are
always shown --
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enabled/disabled as the current application state allows.
To me it seems that all the items are always displayed regardless of
whether they could be useful or not (why would I get all the text related
services in Preview otherwise?). This seems to be more along the 'same
menu' idea.
>
I think this is actually the very optimal solution.
Perhaps as far as the development effort / usefulness ratio given the
current set of tools for developers is concerned. From a user's point of
view the comparison to Apple's Data Detectors IMHO makes Services menu
look very clumsy - but I guess that it would be much harder (impossible?)
to implement the features offered by ADD in the style Services are provided.
Cheers
Sven
--
Sven-S. Porst . PGP: 0x0085ABA3 .
http://homepage.mac.com/ssp
Pass as best inventor!