Haiku Activity & Contract Report, July 2022 | Haiku Project

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:

4 Likes

For big apps with lots of features, menu bars are probably here to stay. They arenā€™t perfect, but humanity hasnā€™t yet figured out something appreciably better: hamburger menus canā€™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. ā€œintelliā€ men just hides options you canā€™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 ā€œits a menu bar but wih a buttonā€ 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 pointlessā€¦

It can do either a hamburger menu or a menu bar, so IDK how it at least canā€™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 isnā€™t the most discoverable way to find it. Then again, itā€™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 foodā€¦ Nobody made a doughnut menu yet? There are a lot of police computers to equipā€¦ :crazy_face:

4 Likes

It depends what you are intending to do really. If instead of designing a completely new ā€œphoneā€ 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 donā€™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, itā€™s just muscle memory. But again, I donā€™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!

Iā€™ve been busy with relocation to Europe and a new job, so I havenā€™t had time to run Haiku since April. I just tried the latest nightly today (real hardware), and it sure is snappier compared to what I remember. Gimp launched faster in Haiku than under Windows, as does LibreOffice (writter and calc). Simple image viewing and PDF viewing is also very quick. File navigation is instant. Even Web+ seems better. I miss leaner systems, it truely shows how fast modern hardware is.

Having been absent from Haiku for over 4 months and the improvement is very visible. Well done Team Haiku.

16 Likes

I am curious, what are the plans for writing userguides when you canā€™t know if the user will see a menubar or an hamburger? Where do you tell them to click?

Also, if you want a single menu, instead of a hamburger icon, why not a text label with ā€œMenuā€ written on it? It would use a few more pixels, maybe, but if anything, that makes it easier to click, which is a great thing for an app main menu which you are going to access a lot

AFAIK the default is a hamburger menu, which can be changed by the user. However based on what Iā€™ve seen in the wild, some guides do account for both hamburger menu and menu bar. Not many of those though, but thatā€™s mostly part of the overall tendency of Linux-adjacent guides to lean towards the CLI instead of the GUI.

1 Like