Thus spoke Marc Lehmann > a) what does HCI mean? ;) Human/Computer interfaces, I think. But I've been wrong before. > b) I always see programs do it the way gimp does it, so there must be > something about it Its sort of a defacto standard (there are probably some style guides that say to do it this way - Motif's for example), though I'm not sure if there is anything that says this configuration is optimal for some reason. > c) you gave _no_ reason why? He sort of said so, but it wasn't clear to me at first either. The problem is that with the Toolbox squeezed in tight horizontally, the Help menu's text button can be squeezed off the right side. His way, that button is butted up against the other menus, so there's a better chance it will at least be partially seen (and thus, accessible). I can see the reasoning for the change, but I couldn't decide which way might be better. The current way is standard, but Gimp is a bit unusual in the fact that it's toolbox is so thin *and* has a menu bar. Often, thin main displays don't have those menus. The menus are provided in some other fashion. In any case, this situation isn't covered very well by current style guides. At least not to my knowledge. > > they are there. Comparison with other image editing apps (especially > > on Unix/Linux) is appreciated, > > I think that the type of application should not influence the place where > the help button menu is placed. > > So... I am not against this change, but I also see no reason to do it, > especially since that makes gimp different to other apps, and I think > there should be a very good reason for this. I believe the main reason would be to make sure the Help menu is accessible from the Toolbox even with a very thin configuration. My opinion might be to move the Help menu into the File menu to make sure it's always accessible. But this might not make much more sense than having it squeezed out to the right. Hard to say which way to go with it. I just had a thought - maybe a scroll out menubar (ie to the right or left), like the iconic menus you get with Photoshop, might help. Then you just need the word "Menus" at the top. Not sure how this would be implemented, though. I don't think there is a stock widget for such things in Gtk. And hiding menus within menus might not help either. Anyway, it was just a thought. -- Michael J. Hammel The Graphics Muse mjhammel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.graphics-muse.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I might be a butterfly, dreaming I'm a man writing down my thoughts. - unknown
