[TYPO3-hci] Quick Question: Pull-down menu library?

[Andreas Balzer]

Hi!
The MS menu like idea has a big problem, which was not discussed yet..
Well, you know the MS products have a specific number of functions and
tools they offer. MS can be sure, that their amount of functions in the
menus do not change. TYPO3 offers 3 to 5,000 functions which have to be
stored in menu. If you like to use 3 menu items, then such a menu will
work fine.. even with 10 it's nice to use. But as soon as your menu is
twice the dimension of your screen, then you'll get crazy in scrolling
all the time horizontaly.

The same happens, if you have to scroll down vertically and your menu
hides, as soon as your mouse cursor reaches the scrollbar..

With this in mind, it's necessary to have several submenus.

Imho: It won't be possible for the T3 4 branch to classify all the
different modules (also those that are installed via ext) into new
categories to create a tabbed menu out of it.

Let's take this idea for T3 5.0, but just use an old school dhtml pop
out menu until that.

Greetings
Andreas

Erik Svendsen schrieb:
> Hello Michael,
> 
>> I think the real problem lies in having more than one menu level,
>> which is horrible for any UI. Basically, a 1-level-dropdown menu
>> already requires quite an effort to click, even for me as a regular
>> mouse user. In regular desktop apps I hardly ever use the menu, and
>> never ever a 2-level-item unless I really need to.
>>
>> I think we should just make sure that there is only one level in every
>> menu. I vaguely remember that e.g. OS X apps don't have more than one
>> menu level at all, if they can help it.
>>
>> Greetings,
>> Michael
> 
> +1. More than 1-level-dropdown are not the best way when you consider
> usability.
> 
> Myself I find tabbed menus, like the proposal of Tapio/Peter as a better
> choice. And there is a reason that MS has ditched most of it's dropdown
> in Office 2007, and replaced it with tabbed menus. Even if I don't are
> any MS fan, I have to say I find the their new HCI an improvement in
> many ways.
> The cons are that tabbed menus takes some more space on the top of the
> page. But I don't think that are a big issue. With most of the users
> probably on 1280 x 1024 (or at least 1024 x 768) screens, and scrolling
> down a natural habitt, I don't find it any problem using some more
> pixels to get a menu who really are usable.
> 
> Tabbed menus combined with use of shortcuts would be my prefered choice.
> 
> This has also a logic compared to the flexform, who also are some kind
> of tabbed menus.
> 
> WBR,
> Erik Svendsen
> www.linnearad.no
> 
>