Re: Prerelease of 0.94 is out

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

> > > On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 00:40, Alan Horkan wrote:
> > > > Dia had a document menubar long before other programs did, [...]
> > >
> > > Didn't know this. :) Just tried it. But don't understand why the context
> > > version of the menu is disabled when the menu bar is activated.
> >
> > Dia also has a "middle click" context menu which really sucks if you have
> > only two buttons on your mouse.  The middle click context menu is
> > accessible by right clicking when the menubar is enable.
> >
> > In the long run just about everything should be accessible without needing
> > to resort to a context menu (I might even go so far as to want to make Dia
> > usable without a mouse/pointing device but that would probably be a bit
> > much).  For the moment it is unfortunately necessary.
>
> I'd rather say that the context menus should be accessible to non-mouse
> users.

Ctrl+F10 I think is supposed to provide access from the keyboard, I really
should learn more about the Accessiblity toolkit (ATK) and do some
testing.

> In case you haven't noticed, context menus have become more an
> more common, as they really put the info in, well, context.  I'd like to
> see more, such as more context help.

The 'right-click' menu as the Gimp and Dia by default provides is not a
'context menu' as it does not do anything context specific.  The middle
click menu can be useful (althought middle clicking using a wheel mouse is
awkward)  and is more like a real context menu.  The Macintosh is very
careful to make sure it is possible to do things without ever needing to
use a context menu but it has recently started putting things in context
menus to allow things to be done with far less clicks so that it acts as a
bonus for experienced users without hiding things completely.  (Even if
you have a single button mouse on a Mac you can get at all the context
menus by ctrl+clicking).

Sodipodi had an interesting combination of the both using part of the menu
for contextual items and the rest for all the standard menu items.  I did
not use it long enough to be able to decide if it was a good idea.

The case in point for me would be Flip Horizontal and Flip Vertical which
although useful in context I believe should also be in the Object menu.
(They were not included there because they only work for shapes but not
programmed objects but I still believe they should be there and it might
even serve as an incentive for someone to make the programmed objects
flippable).

The only other context menu item I can remember wanting to use was adding
nodes to polygons/beziergons or lines.  That could be fixed by allow more
of these kinds of options to be set as default properties of the
drawing tool or perhaps having a seperate 'node edit' tool like Inkscape
has (or maybe just allowing ctrl+click to add nodes).

- Alan