9 Jul
2008
9 Jul
'08
11:42 p.m.
Hi,
[snip]
I like it. However, the way we group the features in
the menu bar is very
important. I think we should find the right balance between putting every
option in the menu and putting every option in the associated
dialog/wizard.
In some cases we may have an option that is both available from a drop-down
menu in the menu bar and through a tab in a modal dialog box - that's not an
issue per se. Let's take the example of links : when using the full-fledged
editor, you'll be able to access some features from both the menu and the
dialog box, while in light editor mode the link button will trigger the
dialog box right away and the only way to choose a different mode will be
through tabs in the dialog box.
For instance I think it would be wrong to have an
Import
menu with entries for any file format you could think of, as it would be
wrong to have a single Import button opening a dialog/wizard with options
for any of those file formats. One solution I can think of is to have a
menu entry like "Import Office Documents" which opens a dialog/wizard from
where you can select what kind of Office document you want to import.
We could do the same thing for the import menu that for macros -> use 2
levels of drop-down menu (primary : MS Office / Open Office / Other , then
secondary : Word / Excel)
In the same way, we could have a single "Link to
Document" menu entry with
an
option on the dialog to create the document if it doesn't exist.
I added the "new document" menu option because I think it makes things
simpler for basic wiki users (who might not be aware that they can create a
link towards a page that does not exist yet). We'll have some choices to
make during the last stage of the design, but if the overall look & feel is
right it shouldn't be too hard.
Guillaume, you should know that in the end the layout
(what features and
in what order) of the tool bar, menu bar, tab bar, or whatever we'll
decide on, will not be hard-coded but read from the configuration. For
instance, the layout of the tool bar could be specified as:
"Bold Italics Strikethrough Underlined | BulletedList NumberedList | ..."
Cool, this way it will be easier to experiment with various configurations
once the editor gets into user testing mode :-)
Guillaume