On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 04:47:48AM +0100, Marc Lehmann wrote: > a) what does HCI mean? ;) Someone already answered this. To see bad examples, either look at http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm or look in a good bookstore. > b) I always see programs do it the way gimp does it, so there must be > something about it They give the same reason you do "Uh, everyone else does it", it seems to originate on Windows, but maybe it's the Mac's fault? The only justification I can think of is "Users have good spatial awareness and can always find the top-left of a window". > c) you gave _no_ reason why? Ah, that wasn't clear from my diagrams? GTK+ draws space either side of a menu item, so the Help menu can cover over Xtns, making it useless and forcing me to have an otherwise unnecessarily wide toolbox. If the Help menu was in the same SET of menu items as File, Xtns (ie on the left) it would never overwrite them, and therefore use less space. Also if we're going to have casualties from manually shortened toolboxes, Help is much less useful than Xtns, because its key features are duplicated elsewhere. Hmm... I should have written that before. > > 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. Oh, I see. Good point. It just seemed "better" to look at similar apps rather than e.g. Hog Racing 2000 or MS Word. > 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. Well, for me it is helpful (see above) and it looks like all the other apps I run, with the exception of XChat. However I'm aware that most of gimp-devel are using a different set of apps from me, and probably making a lot more use of MS Windows, this may even be *more* true of our ordinary users. It's not a gratuitous change, but I'm not going to defend it to the death if people object. Nick.
