On Fri, 25 May 2001, Tuomas Kuosmanen wrote:
On 22 May 2001 02:09:00 +0200, Branko Collin wrote:
On 21 May 2001, at 17:47, Raphael Quinet wrote:
So in parallel with the discussion about the distribution of plug-ins,
there should be a discussion about how to organize the menus. One
idea that was proposed on this list some time ago was to be able to
limit the number of things that are included in the menus. Some M$
applications offer reduced menus for beginners,
What the menus in MS Word do is show the most important items plus
those items you use the most.
There is one big problem with this: tutorials. People are already having
big problems following the tutorials that are written for
gimp-before-the-menu-reorganization, now I think it could be just
horribly hard if the tutorial says "Select Image -> Colors -> Filter
Pack" and if that was considered "Advanced" while our user chose
"Beginner" when starting Gimp for the first time. So it would not be in
the menus at all.
As long as the user knows that she is only seeing a part
of the menus, this should not be a problem. If you are
in "Beginner" mode, there should be something in the
menus that gives a hint about the fact that you are only
seeing a part of the full menu. This could be something
as simple as an arrow pointing down, appended at the
last line of the menu. Clicking on this arrow would
bring the full menu or open a dialog window asking if
you want to switch to a different mode. As long as the
user gets some feedback and knows how to display the full
menus, then it should not be a problem.
I would like to have at least a "Beginner" mode and a
"Normal" or "Advanced" mode. I am not sure if adding the
most frequently used items to the list of currently
visible items is a good idea. This means that the menus
would look different depending on how you use the Gimp,
and I would prefer that the "Beginner" mode looks the same
for everybody at any time.
Adding the most frequently used items to the menus is
solving a convenience problem for experienced users, while
having different modes is solving the "getting familiar
with the Gimp" problem for beginners. I think that solving
the latter is more important.
-Raphael
