[Qgis-developer] Better Menus for QGIS 1.0

[Tom Elwertowski]

Tim Sutton wrote:
> I agree the changes you suggest would take QGIS to a next level of
> polish prior to a 1.0 release. On non mac platforms menus on dialogs
> are atypical though and I would prefer to #ifdef that behaviour into
> mac specific blocks.

I will make all extra menu bars Mac-only so that additional menu bars do not appear for X11/Win QGIS where there are none today. Since the X11/Win bars would appear inside the window just above the toolbar, one viewpoint is that they just take up extra space and are somewhat redundant. For a Mac, however, the bar space is outside the window and not available for other uses so the lack of a menu bar makes an application look unfinished.

> I think edge cases such as composer which stretch
> the idea of being a dialog should be better addressed by embedding
> them into the main window while hiding the map canvas and updating
> toolbars and menus based on context. We could provide a menu item in
> the view menu to switch between composer mode and map view mode. All
> the other dialogs that I can think of off-hand should not require /
> display menus on non mac platforms.

I don't like the idea of sharing a window for two views. This probably reveals my heritage as an early Mac user but one of the reasons I like a Mac and dislike Windows is that early Mac applications always had lots of windows while MSWindows applications tend to share a single window among multiple uses. I don't consider it an improvement that the shared window approach is displacing the multiwindow approach for recent Mac applications.

A good user interface offers more than one way to accomplish as task, however. Thus, I would favor a solution that, for example, offered a preference to reuse the main window or open extra windows for extra views so that different work styles can be accommodated.

Tom