The Mile High Menu Bar

In his book "UI Design for Programmers", Joel Spolsky mentions the Mile High Menu Bar concept - that on the Macintosh the menu bar for an application is always on top of the screen, and changes according to the current application. On Windows, each window has its own menu, and thus the user has to navigate the mouse to a very small area to click, while on a Mac you simply go up until you reach the edge, and you're there.

Another similar annoyance in Windows is the Start Menu - even if my task bar is in one-line view, the Start Menu isn't QUITE in the corner. When I'm in two-line view, which is the usual, it's not even close. This would count a lot for usability, in my book.

And now a new point for improvement - in Firefox, when the window in maximized, the scrollbar is right at the edge of the screen. All you need to do is push the mouse right, click and drag. In IE, there's a pixel or two of window borders between the edge and the scrollbar - two pixels away from convenience.

So a couple of questions:
1) Beta testers - is this any different in Vista beta1? Either a pixel-level fix or a complete UI concept change?
2) Scoble / MSers - is this any different in Vista beta2?

Yggdrasil wrote:

Another similar annoyance in Windows is the Start Menu - even if my task bar is in one-line view, the Start Menu isn't QUITE in the corner. When I'm in two-line view, which is the usual, it's not even close. This would count a lot for usability, in my book.

I'm afraid I don't see this. The start menu is completely in the corner here.

Yes. My Start button is all the way in the corner. It's that way on my Windows XP machines, by the way.

And Office 12? Well, I could tell you, but then I'd have to ...

I actually find the Mac menu approach much more cumbersome, for two reasons:

1) I use big pixel count screens (1900x1200 on the machine I'm at right now) and I configure my mouse for accurate control (relatively low speed, acceleration disabled) which means that moving to the top of the screen completely wipes out the benefits offered by fits law - it's too slow.

2) No mnemonics.  With the Mac, either you learn the cryptic shortcuts, or you use the mouse.  But in Windows, I do almost all my menu navigation from the keyboard - Alt-F for the File menu and so on.

That second one is the biggie.  I know that it is possible to drive a Mac menu from the keyboard, but it 'works' in that "We made this work in order to pass the legal minimum accessiblity requirements" way.  Compare this to Windows, where the mnemonic-driven use of the user interface is something you would actually use out of choice.

Apple seem to regard mouse operation and shortcuts to be the only two worthwhile modes.  Apple are wrong.  This is the single most frustrating experience for any competent Windows user trying to move to a Mac, IMO.


Mouse acceleration has a lot to answer for...  I've watched an incredible number of people struggle to hit targets on screen entirely because mouse acceleration makes it almost impossible to accurately position the pointer.  The defaults on both the Mac and Windows seem like they were chosen specifically to make it almost impossible to hit targets with ease.

Turn off mouse acceleration, and all of a sudden, these targets the UI designers are so keen to tell us are so difficult to hit become a breeze to aim at.

You've got to love the irony of the current name for mouse acceleration in Windows.  It's enabled by checking the "Enhance pointer precision" checkbox - that exactly the opposite of what mouse acceleration actually does!

Strange. On XPSP2 here, using the Windows Classic theme, the start menu is a bit off for me - unclickable. There's a noticable border beneath the button.

As for keyboard shortcuts - yes, I agree. Windows is very keyboard-accessible for those who know the mnemonics (Ctrl-+, how I love thee). But it's not either/or - the mouse shouldn't be neglected.

In classic mode there is still a gap, with Luna turned on the start button goes right to the edge.

Yggdrasil, you find the menu bar at the top a good thing???

OMG, can't believe that.
I always found that one of the worst design concepts of Apple, really!  It's especially cumbersome on large screens (and now with high resolution monitors being so affordable...)  The distance you have to travel with your mouse, aaargh!!  And the fact that the menus change when you bring another window to the foreground!

Menus should always be as close within reach as possible, and are a part of the active application, NOT of the operating system!!!

And your other remark doesn't make sense as well, the start menu button is completely in the corner (checked on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003).

Yggdrasil wrote:

And now a new point for improvement - in Firefox, when the window in maximized, the scrollbar is right at the edge of the screen. All you need to do is push the mouse right, click and drag. In IE, there's a pixel or two of window borders between the edge and the scrollbar - two pixels away from convenience.

THIS IS NOT TRUE AS WELL !!!

I'm working with IE6 here, and I can go completely to the edge and use the scrollbar!

No pixels in between like you say!  So I guess you are using a non default theme???

dotnetjunkie wrote:

Yggdrasil wrote: And now a new point for improvement - in Firefox, when the window in maximized, the scrollbar is right at the edge of the screen. All you need to do is push the mouse right, click and drag. In IE, there's a pixel or two of window borders between the edge and the scrollbar - two pixels away from convenience.

THIS IS NOT TRUE AS WELL !!!

I'm working with IE6 here, and I can go completely to the edge and use the scrollbar!

No pixels in between like you say!  So I guess you are using a non default theme???

Agreed. All of the OPs complaints above are fixed for me using all default apps in all default configurations...

Jeremy W. wrote:

Agreed. All of the OPs complaints above are fixed for me using all default apps in all default configurations...

Very strange.
Switching to Luna, I see that the Start Menu has been fixed and now inhabits the corner peacefully. But even then, a maximized IE's scrollbar is a pixel away from the edge.

Yggdrasil wrote:

But even then, a maximized IE's scrollbar is a pixel away from the edge.

That looks like a misconfigured desktop client size setting to me.

Try dragging your taskbar to your desktop's right side, enabling then disabling auto-hide, then dragging it back down.

...that solved my problem when the "Groupbar" changed my desktop size settings.

W3bbo wrote:

Try dragging your taskbar to your desktop's right side, enabling then disabling auto-hide, then dragging it back down.

Well, that felt very Voodoo.

Didn't help, though. And I've seen it on more than one machine.

Yggdrasil wrote:

Well, that felt very Voodoo.

Didn't help, though. And I've seen it on more than one machine.

Yep, the scrollbar thing is perfectly reproducible here. Not sure about the Start button, I have it near the middle on a dual monitor display so I can't hit "the corner" anyway.

As for Windows keyboard shortcuts, I've always found it to be very hit and miss. Try doing away with a mouse for a week and you'll soon notice that a lot of apps have an annoying or just plain broken tab order between controls if they're even usable at all. The Mac isn't much better but it does tend to at least be consistently rubbish.

Yggdrasil wrote:

In his book "UI Design for Programmers", Joel Spolsky mentions the Mile High Menu Bar concept - that on the Macintosh the menu bar for an application is always on top of the screen, and changes according to the current application. On Windows, each window has its own menu, and thus the user has to navigate the mouse to a very small area to click, while on a Mac you simply go up until you reach the edge, and you're there.

Mile High Menu Bar = something in Virgin Atlantic Upper Class?  I knew about the massage station and the wet bar, but this one sounds more intriguing...

Do you know what "ordinary" people do, when they're done with an app on OS X?  They close the app's main window, thinking they are closing the app.  NO, the app is STILL running, which they'd know if a) you looked at the "Mile High Menu Bar" and saw that it still had the app-specific menu, or b) looked at the Dock and noticed there was a tiny black triangle underneath the app's icon.

But I'm guessing ordinary people don't do that, because when I walk over to a shared Mac, I always see a dozen apps still running, but with no app windows.  And yes these are MAC USERS doing this.

What's intuitive to most people is: close app window = close app.

What's NOT intuitive is "scroll allllll the way up to Mile High Menu Bar, pull down 2ND menu from left (which is for the app... the 1st one is for the "System!") and select Exit.

The problem is that you have muddled System functions (such as Shutdown/Restart) with app-specific functions (such as File -> Exit).

Eventually Apple will get it right and steal it from Windows.  Kind of like how Apple stole the idea of being able to resize a window from more than one corner... or of having Explorer-type views in the finder... or using file extensions instead of resource forks... or of using ACLs instead of Unix permissions... but I digress.... 

Oh and Jeez, for anyone whose Start button isn't exactly lined up neatly at the left edge of the screen, there are these buttons on your monitor to control the position of the image, you might want to check them out.

Karim wrote:

Oh and Jeez, for anyone whose Start button isn't exactly lined up neatly at the left edge of the screen, there are these buttons on your monitor to control the position of the image, you might want to check them out.

That's not the point. The start bar being in the corner means I can move my mouse to the corner of the screen and click and have it open. If it isn't exactly in the corner, I need to stop just short of the corner for my click to work, which is much harder to do. The same is true for the control box (icon) and close button of a window when maximized: these are completely against the corners, making them far more easy to click.

No amount of monitor adjustment can achieve that.

Sven Groot wrote:

Karim wrote:Oh and Jeez, for anyone whose Start button isn't exactly lined up neatly at the left edge of the screen, there are these buttons on your monitor to control the position of the image, you might want to check them out.

That's not the point. The start bar being in the corner means I can move my mouse to the corner of the screen and click and have it open. If it isn't exactly in the corner, I need to stop just short of the corner for my click to work, which is much harder to do. The same is true for the control box (icon) and close button of a window when maximized: these are completely against the corners, making them far more easy to click.

No amount of monitor adjustment can achieve that.

Interesting tidbit:

(I'm running in "Classic" mode)

When I move my mouse to the bottom left corner (not directly over the start button) and click, then my mouse pointer "jumps" to the bottom left hand corner of the button itself (1px/1px away from the screen corner) and the menu appears.

Nifty.

W3bbo wrote:

When I move my mouse to the bottom left corner (not directly over the start button) and click, then my mouse pointer "jumps" to the bottom left hand corner of the button itself (1px/1px away from the screen corner) and the menu appears.

I get the jump, but it STILL doesn't hit the button and doesn't show the menu.