[Psi-devel] Re: recent Remote Control, Execute Command, AdHoc work

[Trejkaz]

On Sun, 26 Jun 2005 17:02, Nolan Eakins wrote:
> Creating a popup menu right before it is displayed isn't hard at all.
> The question is whether UI design guidelines for OS X and possibly Gnome
> should be broken. I'm not entirely sure what they say about items that
> are of different types, say files vs. directories for example, but I
> know for most other things designers are advised to show every option
> even disabled ones to aid in memorizing the menu item's position. Either
> checking the guidelines or passing it by Julian Missig might be good. He
> just comes to mind because I think he might be a little specialized in
> UI design.

The question is, is a command which can be executed the "same type" as a 
groupchat server or a transport?  I would at least argue that two things are 
the same type only if their service discovery identities are the same.

But the bigger problem is, as the number of things you can do to a single item 
grow and grow, the menu gets longer and longer, and sometimes it just makes 
more sense to start hiding the options to save space.

Besides, disabling menu items is "considered harmful" in itself.  When a menu 
option is greyed out, the user has no idea why it's greyed out, so they can't 
even figure out how to use it.  I remember reading a paper on that subject, 
which asked designers to make all options actionable, but to pop up an 
informative dialog to describe exactly why the action couldn't be performed 
at the time it was requested.

TX

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             Email: Trejkaz Xaoza <trejkaz at trypticon.org>
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