[Interest] Long menus on Windows

[André Somers]

Op 31-5-2013 19:25, John Weeks schreef:
> We have a couple very long menus in our application (containing a list 
> of functions in our internal programming language). On Macintosh, the 
> menu simple runs from the top to the bottom of the screen and scrolls 
> very quickly. On Windows, it shows as a multi-column menu that fills 
> the monitor!
>
> Is there a way to get a single, scrolling column on Windows?
>
> A work-around would be to provide a dialog instead, with a list of 
> functions. That requires more clicks to get to the desired item.
>
 From a UX point of view: don't do that. Don't create menus that are too 
big to fit on the screen. You are fooling yourself if you think that an 
additional mouse click translates in additional time in this case. You 
also need to factor in the time to actually locate the item in the menu, 
and the potential scrolling that takes. That will likely take an order 
of magnitude more time than an extra click if that means you can present 
the options in a more managable way.

What I'd do, is a combination of two things:
1) categorize
Don't present all functions in a single big list (by default), but 
distribute them into sane categories.

2) allow search
If you present a search box, people can just type to trim down the list 
of functions you present. To be really friendly, match on any part of 
the function name, but also on a description for it.

And yes, this is perfectly doable in Qt.

André

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