> menu bars (the greatest invention in IT, bar none
Menu bars are terrible! Visually navigating a tree structure via mousing is a nightmare, especially if the whole thing disappears or radically shifts if you mouse a few pixels off. Visually scanning huge, variable chunks of the screen is inefficient, awkward, and a burden.
Everything that you can do with those nasty, collapsible visual hierarchies can be done way more efficiently and way more accessibly via a nice search interface with fuzzy filtering and autocompletion.
When it's actually fast and unencumbered by bullshit like advertisements, something like Spotlight or the modern Windows start search is infinitely better than crap like the Windows 9x start menu.
If you've ever coached someone through navigating a graphical, hierarchical menu they've never seen before, you know how painfully slow all that mental processing actually is. Even a hunt and peck typist will be faster in most cases, as all they have to type is at most a handful of letters. Menu bars suck in the exact same way, and they ought to be either eliminated or replaced in the same way as ye olde start menu, too.
I very much disagree, the discoverability with a search interface is terrible. With a menu bar even the most computer-illiterate troglodyte (e.g. me) can just go oh, it says "Help" there, I'll click it without having to worry about my one neuron overheating.
EDIT: I think the best option is taking the golden middle road and having a menu bar which can be searched through, kind of like Unity has.
> I think the best option is taking the golden middle road and having a menu bar which can be searched through, kind of like Unity has.
Yes! I've been a KDE person since like KDE 3.4, but I gave Unity a chance in its heyday and I absolutely loved it for that feature.
Discoverability with a search interface can be improved by adding a visual representation of search categories or common search terms, and an old-school hierarchical menu can do just fine for that. (I think a different kind of menu might be better for discovery, though. You could do a more search/filtering-oriented descent of the same hierarchy, and enrich the menu entries being filtered with documentation and previews.)
Discoverability of search interfaces can also be improved with by tagging things with synonyms and descriptions, so that users can search by task instead of the app's canonical names for functions.
Menu bars are terrible! Visually navigating a tree structure via mousing is a nightmare, especially if the whole thing disappears or radically shifts if you mouse a few pixels off. Visually scanning huge, variable chunks of the screen is inefficient, awkward, and a burden.
Everything that you can do with those nasty, collapsible visual hierarchies can be done way more efficiently and way more accessibly via a nice search interface with fuzzy filtering and autocompletion.
When it's actually fast and unencumbered by bullshit like advertisements, something like Spotlight or the modern Windows start search is infinitely better than crap like the Windows 9x start menu.
If you've ever coached someone through navigating a graphical, hierarchical menu they've never seen before, you know how painfully slow all that mental processing actually is. Even a hunt and peck typist will be faster in most cases, as all they have to type is at most a handful of letters. Menu bars suck in the exact same way, and they ought to be either eliminated or replaced in the same way as ye olde start menu, too.