Haiku Activity & Contract Report, July 2022 | Haiku Project

Luckily the apple Lisa introduced a better menubar.

Can you explain why it is used by Haiku?

It isn’t.
It’s dead code that waddlesplash fixed, for some reason.

Anyway it was added here: https://cgit.haiku-os.org/haiku/commit/src/apps/webpositive?id=e6809b325a8abd0f8a2b83e366b5483358fc15b6

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It isn’t yet. I see Manjaro Plasma and other Linux based distributions are coming to small touch screens. Why not other operating systems like Haiku? I bought a PinePhone just to run Genode on it for some added security.

I see no problems to bring Haiku on mobile touch devices, but please don’t break desktop interface. Haiku on smartphone will need separate interface.

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KDE has two separate interfaces, Plasma Desktop and Plasma Mobile. The latter is what’s being shipped on the PinePhone, although they do share some convergent applications.

If Haiku were to end up on mobile, it should prolly also be with a separate and dedicated interface (maybe even different apps altogether).

Further discussions on this have occurred here on the forum, along with some UI mockups:

Thanks for the link to last December’s discussion. I think the “hamburger menu” button belongs on a tablet and phone interface product. Most likely a separate fork for mobile. Perhaps we should move discussion to the other thread regarding the “Maple fork” for glass elevator features.

It is used on this very page.

Yes, disquss is a forum software we don’t develop or maintain.

If we had the ressources we could probably make a much better software than this “web 2.0” “cool” stuff.
There are lots of things wrong with the software but fwiw it does fullfil its primary role, to let people communicate in threads.

Off topic about forum

I like that the Discourse forum software uses a ReST interface for all network queries but there’s no time to make a native app to view it with when there’s work to be done on WebPositive. It’s possible to bypass the web interface though.

Fine, I certainly don’t think any time should be wasted on it. I was simply curious.

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Waddlesplash mentioned that we have more recurring donors. That’s great news.

However, I think it’s worth mentioning (if it hasn’t been said before) that the PayPal fees for small transactions are very high. I have therefore switched to a single annual donation which maximises the money received by Haiku, and minimises that received by PayPal.

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EPOC (psion) did it by using normal menus that disappear until you press menu key or a touch screen silkscreen icon. Worked very well and required no learning because it’s the same as on a PC and the same in every app. Unlike on mobile UIs now where in 90% of apps I find it impossible to find the settings menu and have to hunt for it every time I need it even for commonly used apps like browser.

You could use the hamburger button as a common way to make the menubar appear though (since no silk screen)…

But then I am not very au fait with mobile interfaces…

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This has been most recently done by KDE with KHamburgerMenu, which provides both a hamburger menu and a menu bar (including global):

Unfortunately, this is limited to Qt apps that implement it. Should this idea ever be implemented in Haiku, would it be possible to not require per-app enablement?

Nice work done by all involved, was glad with the given time I could spent to do some work on the GTK apps/add-ons :ok_hand:

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For big apps with lots of features, menu bars are probably here to stay. They aren’t perfect, but humanity hasn’t yet figured out something appreciably better: hamburger menus can’t fit everything without becoming insane; ribbons take up much more space and suffer from the same categorization problems; sidebars take up even more space;

Except that microsoft solved severall of these problems alredy. “intelli” men just hides options you can’t use now, less to sort through.

The ribbon is an okay design honestly, if it is done properly.

But more to the point, there is one thing that makes menus drastically more easy to use: a search bar. Word online has this, word with ribbons has this etc. And we could totally add this too.
There is enough space for a search bar, and we can use type-ahead filtering aswell.
Additionally a search bar lets you search for the menu entries in different languages.

Anyhow, the kHamburger menu with its “its a menu bar but wih a button” provides almost none of the advantages that the hamburger menu has, that is no categorization and less more specific actions.
But then it also takes away the advantages menu of the menubar. so uhh, kinda pointless…

It can do either a hamburger menu or a menu bar, so IDK how it at least can’t have the advantages of a menu bar when set to be one.

Some applications (e.g. IntelliJ IDEA, VS Code, Discord, anything using KCommandBar) have implemented a search HUD that allows for searching through various menu options. It is usually invoked with a keyboard shortcut, which isn’t the most discoverable way to find it. Then again, it’s normally touted as a power user feature.

Apps no longer have any expectation that users use a menu bar, and thus use them even worse than they are now. some devs will only test with hamburger menus etc.

Speaking of junk food… Nobody made a doughnut menu yet? There are a lot of police computers to equip… :crazy_face:

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It depends what you are intending to do really. If instead of designing a completely new “phone” user interface you instead think about adapting a desktop user interface to limited screen space, it makes sense to have a menu bar that can be shown/hidden, to have all apps run borderless full screen, to make every app support zoom in a generic way, etc. But this is perhaps better for a different device category (handheld computers, like the planet computers devices, and netbooks).

There are also different types of user, for example I never use the hamburger menu on firefox because I first have to hunt to find it, and then its content is different to every other app, so I have to read the entries and hunt for the one I want. Instead I press alt to bring up the standard menu because I know what things will be in file, edit, view etc, and that means I don’t have to really look at the options in the menu to find what I am looking for, because they are already familiar and mostly the same as every other app, it’s just muscle memory. But again, I don’t know if I am a dinosaur because I also really dislike the ribbon UI and can never find anything in it.

Love this idea!