On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, Bryce Harrington wrote:
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Mental is looking for feedback right now regarding how the menus are laid out. Take a look at the screenshot linked on the homepage. You can help us a lot by going over it with a fine toothed comb and listing your detailed thoughts on it.
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I live to critize! I love this stuff as do many others, so if there are specific things that I dont like but you disagree then there are plenty of people far more expert than I am willing to give an opinion if you mail usability@...45...
http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/new_interface_0.png
First thing that immediately strikes me, the Inkscape menu. Please don't I dont have a top level menu named after the program, very few programs do this (Sodipodi being the only one I can think of immediately, some programs do replace the file menu with a Game menu or something else program specfic but generally developers) try to keep things as consistant as possible.
I'd add a Help menu, even if you only have the About dialog to put there.
I'll try and give more feedback soon, this message has been languishing in my Drafts folder for days already so rather than leave it any longer I'm sending it now with the following hopefully useful link to two files http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/ containing the menu layout structure for Adobe Illustrator http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/illustrator-menus.txt and the top level menu structure of various applications several vector graphics programs http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~horkana/inkscape/menus.txt (please dont pay too much attention to my semi-random comments in the files).
You'll see that in Mental's redesign the Dialogs menu is gone.
WooHoo! Nice work Mental!
Hopefully I'll have time this weekend to take a more rigourous look at the proposed redesign.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/