|
|
|
[
Permlink
| « Hide
]
McCabe Maxsted added a comment - 04/May/08 02:24 PM
Patch and xml file were made against 1.20 RC5.
I'm adding the internal ID of the equivalent issue being tracked by Linden Lab.
Hi. I don't quite see the benefits of having a "Window" menu. It's too similar to the "View" menu. I'd much rather have an "Avatar" menu that gathers everything that you can do with your avatar, and becomes an anchorpoint on everything collaborative in Second Life.
Basically, tho, I'd fill it with the following entries:
This would clean up the somewhat cluttered "View" menu and give a bit of room in the "World" menu. You could easily expand the "Environment Settings" submenu then. I also don't quite get how you understand "consistent":
Please don't forget that the edit commands also work on the inventory structure, text in notecards, scripts, and probably in a couple other places as well... Consistent being, consistent with how I've reorientated the viewer menus as I listed above. You clearly think they should be reordered along different lines, which would mean a different internal consistency.
The benefits of the Window menu are that it cleans up certain loose entries that don't belong in other menus. It is not similar at all to the View menu, and if you look at the way I've laid out the menus you'll see that. Ideally, it wouldn't be needed at all its options really should go into the preferences or somewhere else, but just in reordering the current menu items I don't see any better place for what it contains. As for the rest:
This is going against convention, I know, but I orientated my viewer menu not on naming, but on function. I.e., it's an organization based on what an option does. My edit menu strictly edits. My view menu strictly opens floaters. My world menu strictly interacts with the world and avatar (well, mostly). Etc. There are plenty of organizations possible other than the one I chose, and your avatar menu is one of them. I toyed with the idea myself before deciding on a less drastic approach (especially considering Advanced menu options can't be moved except by editing the source and I'd love to have Rebake in any Avatar menu). Personally I don't like the idea of one menu being the main focus at the expense of the others, but an Avatar menu like the one you described could be fun to make, as it presents its own consistency problems (what do you put in the other menus, and how will those have internal consistency?). Let me make an Avatar menu and see what comes about, hehe. Snapshots should both be under file. If not under file, then under view. Not under World.
And I rarely send snapshots as postcards and far more often save them to disk than save them in world. "snapshot to disk" is not how I (or anyone) normally saves snapshots to disk... that's more like a "save ANOTHER snapshot like the one I just set up". Sun settings should be in view, just like the environment editor. Beacons should be in view. nods Okay, I've moved snapshots back into File. The difference between beacons and sun settings, and the environment editor, is that the environment editor opens up a kind of preferences file for the world, whereas beacons and setting the sun actively change the world on selection. It's two different kinds of interactions, and I wanted to keep the world menu limited to only options that directly change the world around the avatar as much as possible. That being said, here's v.2 of my menus:
This creates some nice spacing between the menus, with not too many sub groups and a good distribution of options, I feel. One question is "Transaction History and "Manage Account". I could see "Transaction History" going into Help, since it accesses an out-of-world service that's a helpful tool, and Help already has several options like this, such as Bug Reporting, Official Linden Blog, Scripting Portal, and the Support site, but I've kept it in World for now ("Transaction History" is the only exception to everything beginning with a verb, which is annoying but tolerable). "Manage Account" is really a poor name for a menu item. I need to think of something better before moving it. As for an Avatar menu, I created one, but found it difficult to create a similar kind of order in the rest of the menus. I think a type of menu like that would be good for a newbie-centered interface, but not one that includes newbie and advanced options as the menu currently does (especially since editing it is still so limited). I'm attaching menu_viewerv3.xml, which will probably be the last one as the menus now feel satisfactory to me. Here's a list of my changes compared to v2:
To move the Environment Editor to World, you'd need to rename it to Edit Environment for grammatical consistency (all menu items in World are now actions), which would be weird considering the similarity to "go to Edit Appearance" that's in the Edit menu. Plus, I like it in the View menu, so I'll leave it there Hey McCabe.
I'm trying to reverse-engineer some of your decisions for "viewerv3". I know you spent a lot of time thinking about this (so I'm trying to steal what I can and what makes sense). My current direction for the menu re-architecture is a bit more extreme than yours. some of this is that we can make more drastic changes than you can in a patch (as you mention above). If I were going to assign a blurb to each of your top-level menus, would it be fair to go with: I'm asking because I'm trying to do the same thing with my menu structure. I am trying structures where there are menus for things like:
Lindens are currently super-busy on menu-reorg.
I'd say that's fair, malbers. Plus:
Tools --> Anything that requires inworld selection to work. How drastic are you thinking of taking the menus? Because I think this could be a good topic for sl-ux: give us an idea of what new menu items you'd like to include, and see what people come up with. One idea I've bandied around with is a three-tier menu system: The user starts out with a newbie menu that shows options for avatar, building, and navigating the world, with a special menu category for "user interface level", where they can select between something like:
Full reveals most of the menu items we have now. Advanced reveals that, plus the Advanced menu. Just a thought. I'm sure you've got a better idea of where things are going, particularly with the Landmarks menu coming and parcel info being moved to the Navbar (at least, I believe that's the plan). I would really rather that menu reorganization was never officially released. I don't know much about everyone else, but once I have learned where all the commands are, I get a
I agree with improving the interface and making it make more sense for new users, but if it does ever happen make it I know that this is just an XML mod, but I would really rather that if it were added into the main viewer that it be optional. Linden Lab just don't seem to grasp that some people do like Second Life the way it is now, and changing it constantly is just making it harder and harder for those people to enjoy their Second Life. Even if it's in debug settings, make it optional. I agree (emphatically) that any major changes to the menu structure should be optional. Rearranging the menus without the user's permission is like rearranging their desks without asking – they won't be able to find anything, they'll get frustrated, and they'll hate your guts for forcing the change on them. It's a matter of courtesy to allow them to learn the new structure gradually, and with as little stress as possible.
My recommendation is that there should be a phase-in period of several months during which the new structure is opt-in. After that time, there should be at least a month (if not forever) that the new menu structure is the default, but the old structure can be switched to. Only after all that would I consider making the new structure the only one offered. I've always assumed that with skin switching now, a new menu layout would be presented as an alternate skin, to be phased in through gradual steps over the course of several releases. At least, that'd make the most sense to me.
There is an alternate menu rework being planned. Marking this as under advisement since some of the ideas here are being documented and will inform the final design.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
New Feature
Resolved
Normal
Reorganize the viewer menu for consistency, relevancy, and ease of use
