Warp wrote:
> Mike Raiford <"m[raiford]!at"@gmail.com> wrote:
>> My WindowsME system worked fine. It was almost indistinguishable from 
>> 98. I think it had the compressed folders feature, which is present in 
>> Windows XP. But that was about it.
> 
>   You forgot one of the most braindead ideas that has ever come from
> Microsoft: Adaptive menus.

I don't know. I like adaptive menus, when they're done well. The "new" 
start menu, that puts the programs you use all the time near the top, 
and the 2003-era Word menus, where they only show you options you've 
used but reveal everything if you hover for a bit, both seem to work 
nicely and without much confusion, once you figure out what's going on.

Now, stuff where it rearranges itself and does *not* present all the 
possibilities is nasty, yes.

The "search" stuff in Vista seems to work nicely, too. I haven't tried 
the ribbon stuff, either, but that looks ugly.

I think you have to do something when you wind up with so many options 
they no longer even fit on a menu. That's probably one reason MS has 
good help systems - you'd not find half the stuff if you couldn't search 
help for "where the H___ have you hidden the XYZ options in *this* 
version now???"

And I still miss the Smalltalk technique of bringing up the pop-up menu 
such that the previous thing you selected is selected again for you. :-)

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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