>>   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 key thing is, Word menues do not change their ordering at random. 
They only change which options are or aren't visible initially.

The new-style start menu is just horrid. Each time you use a different 
program, the order of the icons on the start menu changes. Horrid, 
horrid, horrid! >_<

(Can you tell I have that mis-feature turned off? Interestingly, if you 
do that you get a menu rather like what Word has - the programs you 
actually use show up, and the ones you don't are initially hidden, but 
everything is always *in the same order*.)

> 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???"

Yeah, well... M$ does like to rearrange menus just to make each version 
of Word look "new", even though it actually contains exactly the same 
functionallity.

> 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. :-)

I don't like that. It means you have to mentually "guess" which option 
will be hilighted each time you use it. I'd rather have the options show 
up a predictable distance from my mouse pointer...

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