This is a terrible idea. The menu bar works great, integrates with shortcuts, and gives 100% discoverability.
Anyone who wants to get rid of it is a bad developer and a bad person.
Anyone who wants to get rid of it is a bad developer and a bad person.
/s
It's bizarre that a search bar that unfolds a vertical menubar when highlighted but unfilled is supposed to be a great advance. It's so unimpressive that I 1) don't mind it at all, and 2) think the menu aspect is useless. It's just a menu command search bar; a good UI library could construct one automatically. Stick it in a corner, or automatically open it when people start typing with no obvious object. It's a triviality.
What bugs people about the GIMP is that it's not Photoshop. All of the GIMPs menu options are placed in eminently logical places. although it's a grammar that probably makes sense over time. Photoshop options are mostly placed randomly, and some of them turn out to be ads. That's not a huge dig at Photoshop, because it's pretty amazing that they ever fix or move anything with so much industry adoption, and adding things has to be a nightmare.
But the GIMP puts things in places because they make sense there. They don't have the base that would get enraged if they moved things. It's extremely telling that when put to specify improvements that could be made, the suggestions are either trivial, like
1) a search bar, or
2) an extra statusbar above the statusbar (in case they want instructions over their instructions), or
3) to make it single-window (because just not moving things is not enough, they have to be prevented from moving things),
or they're just:
4) "Make it more like Photoshop! When I use Photoshop I know where things are, and when I use GIMP, I don't!"
The GIMP is wonderful and its problems are technical: it has lacked some of the ability of Photoshop, but that gap slowly but surely continues to close.
edit: I can't believe I forgot the worst one: "Why when I click Save does it save my project, but when I want to export a file based on my project, I have to pick Export?"
Every time I try GIMP it's a nightmare. Even the simplest thing usually makes me find a video to explain where to find it. Cutting, pasting and layer management is a pain. For super simple stuff I use Pinta and anything marginally complex I use photoshop and it's always felt easy.
I know that's hardly scientific but I've always seen photoshops interface as good.
Six-year-old Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/7esx08/even_with_late...
I don't think it's fixed yet.
Please don't do this. You know that isn't true.
If someone wants menus in a pop up box, you can simply hide the menu bar until the user presses Alt (or F12 depending on your OS's convention).
Inventing an entire new weird system for pure novelty while saying "fuck you" to accessibility for disabled people... is just not okay behavior.
- can't search
- don't have 100% functionality
> [Search] kinda works when you generally know what you need or how a feature you want could be called. But really not when this is your first rodeo.
Now if search were the only means of discovery, that would be bad. Imagine if no two pages linked together: everything had to be found in an index. That's a strawman though. Search complements other modes of discovery.
How about REdiscoverability. You remember some feature in the program and some words related to it, but ... where the heck was it? Search can help.
(a) what percentage of web pages do you think can be found by a person using a search engine, without specific prior knowledge of the content?
(b) do you believe an application in which the same percentage of features are discoverable has acceptable discoverability?
In the sense that, for instance, if I find a great Greek restaurant I didn't know existed, that counts as discovery, even though I already know Greek food and was searching for that.
It's also wrong, for example, you can discover all the file operations by typing in "file" in the search box even if it's your first rodeo
Also, search box can list all the commands as some commands palettes do in other apps, so you can just scroll to discover 100% of listed commands. It can also show categories, that's, for example, how I discover 100% of commands for some plugin by typing its name and reading the list of commands in the search results
Btw, this problem doesn't go away with the menu (like mentioned in another thread): it's hard to discover by looking through a huge nested list, especially when this list is poorly organized like in Gimp, and incomplete, and not context dependent
So no, search is on the same side of discoverability, and the op doesn't claim otherwise, that's your mistaken interpretation
If that's the sentence you thought I meant, then pretending you didn't know what I was talking about was a lie and you should find somewhere other than HN to hang out.
So you mean that I should loop through [a-zA-Z0-9]* to search which name is defined so that I can use that function? What pills do you take, I want them.
Discoverability is the measure of how well an application presents features to you that you didn't necessarily know were there.
A menu may be a list of features, when you open the menu you discover those features.
A search box is a box. It shows no features. Search results might show features but those features might also not relate at all to the task you're doing, which means they're out of context. That's extremely poor discoverability. You can find all the features, you can't discover them.
The problem with search and discoverability is that search requires input from me, whereas discoverability means that the program explicitly offers its features to me. With search, I would never discover some handy new feature I wouldn't think of myself, or something that is named differently than I expect.
Hunting through a menu, while not optimal, allows me to view a 'catalog' of all the features.
The menu doesn't resolve these issues: if you don't know that yank is copy, seeing it in the catalogue won't help much, especially if instead of the usual cut/yank/paste that could give you a hint, you have cut/paste is in some "destructive edits" menu, and yank is elsewhere
And you can very well not have a command in the menu, after all, coding to have a command automatically dumped in a global list is easier that remembering to add it manually to some menu category
And the input to search can be blank: you'll get the same catalogue with the same categories like in the menu (watch the video, the popup search has all the menu categories), so there is almost no difference, so there is nothing magical 1000% discoverability in this menu design
A “menu”, if you will ;)