Reply to Icon Based Menus

First of all, thanks for all you users who posted comments on www.OSNews.com it was very helpful and allows me to get this project done faster. First of all I did not know it would catch on that quickly... Icon based menus I have not seen in any current or old designs. This is not a toolbar or the OSX Dock. It slides and is not static. About the icons, you are all right... just blobing some icons wont get the job done but has to be thought about carefully just like any toolbar icon. Many icons have done well and are recognized by most users very quickly. I am a user perfectionist when it comes to small details. I can go through entire applications pinpointing problems. I once gave a company multiple emails of about 83 changes/fixed/ideas to implement and they did implement most of them. Just like the OS X dock has not been such a huge hit because of it's usability problems (the icons move without users doing so and thier order is not preserved) and my idea does not suffer the OS X dock problems because it only moves when the user moves them. This is why it can be spatially browsed. The user makes the changes... just like we remember where the light switch is, even if we do leave the room it's because it only changes when we change it directly. The icon based menus are not displayed at all times but rather are a popup when you tap a button (or the 'Go' button in the future Screens Environment). And you would not be browsing all your applications from a single swipe but rather it would be categorized and you would browse categories. It just makes it easier when the mouse/pen dont have to move all over the screen (i.e. Start menu) just to get an application/document running. This is why it has to be navigational browsing and not spatial in the way of 'windows' because thier is no point for location memory here but only position memory. While using them for actual File/Edit/View menus will have to see in the beta testing, the launching of applications, recent documents, settings and so on will be in the icon bar for sure because of the speed it allows you to get to a certain object once you know what you want (i.e. Applications->Games->Cards->Solitare) and if you dont know where the object is... no matter... just tap the edit box (dont ask for mockups... I cant do them at the moment while the code is not done) below the icons and write letters to show the results in the icon bar. Then you can just sway left/right to find the object you want and it will tell you where it found it. This method is a bit like alt+esc with alt+tab mixed together with some extras. Although I did not know about alt+esc (thanks for the tip) it has similar capabilities but with a quicker way to activate windows. When activing windows in the icon bar, you dont have to actually tap the window you want but rather only the thumbnail in the center gets it's window brought to the front. However if it leaves the center, the window returns to it's original stack order. Only a window which is tapped on (therefore hiding the icon bar) gets it's window to continue to be on top. Also the icons would not be applications specific but more general. I dont know about what to do for the application menus but for windows it would be thumbnails and for applications thier icons and for documents also thumbnails with a miniture application icon on the bottom right. When I mean icon based menus, I am including text in the idea. Without text you would all be right to say the design sucks (i.e. MacOS Dock). Text would be used to identify the icons but afterwards you could identify the icons much quicker. How many times do you actually read the word 'Back' when you are browsing back/forward using the IE toolbar buttons? Very rarely. The idea might sound corny without any mockups but I did not intend for it to be a 'wide-scale' article just a thought of mind. When I finish the layers component code, I will able to show you real animations of the thing working since the icon bar is one of the first UI parts I need to code. BTW: I just got married last week which is why I dont have much time on my hands ;)