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> Oh, and yes, it should be under the Message menu item as well as just > a button. (Apple's Address Book has a bunch of useful options that > you can't discover without semi-random clicking on parts of the > interface. NO THIS IS BAD LET ME SCROLL AROUND THE MENU STRUCTURE > PLEASE THANK YOU.) Oh yes, this is one of my biggest gripes about Apple. Context-sensitive menus. They ran into this problem on the Xerox Star office system, and came up with the menu bar to avoid it. Then later on they found that context sensitive actions are useful accelerators, so they started putting them in. First there was option-click, then control-click for a menu (except when control-click already meant something else), then they made control click unversal. But they forgot why they'd dropped context menus in the first place. ALL actions should be visible in the menu bar. Putting service menus there was a good idea (from NeXT) but that doesn't really go far enough. CONTEXT menus and option-clicks and command-clicks and control-command- option-F1-corner-clicks should be alternatives. Secondary, not primary. Preferably managed by the user or learned from the user's actions so that frequently-used actions end up getting the acceleration. Instead we have a about six different APIs that hide different commands in different places, and it's a mess. Apple has WAY too much of a rep for their user interfaces. They've got the famous human interface guidelines, so they must be experts. Huh. They don't follow those guidelines (quicktime 4, anyone, how about the whole "metal" thing)? Some of them are just plain bad (single button mice, maniac insistence on the "cancel" button, ...). And they're right bastards about it (mac OS has been essentially themable at the OS level (which is the right place to do that) since 8.something, but Jobs declared the platinum, then aqua, then metal GUI are an important part of the brand or some damn thing). Mutter. Mutter.There's stuff above here
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