Ok, so at least for you Richard, it's not an issue because it's horizontal, it's just an issue because they could have implemented it better...?
What about everyone else who doesn't like it?
Interestingly...
> For a sterling example of GOOD space usage, look at the menu bar which has been standard across the top of every GUI OS screen since the very 1st Macintosh back in 1984...
Well... funny you should mention that...
Dunno about Windows, but if you right click on almost any toolbar on a Mac (including the FileMaker one), you can change the icons to small, and/or turn off either the icons or the text.
I'll confess one thing FM's got wrong there is when you make the toolbar show text only, and then click the Records, Find or QuickFind items it then reverts back to showing icon and text. If they'd made that work a bit better then we'd have a solution. The Mac OS pops temporarily down a sheet with the appropriate UI piece in Mail, Finder, etc. when set up that way. Perhaps FM could do that in a future version.
Still, setting the icons to small and removing the text does indeed reduce the screen real estate issue significantly. In fact, I'd argue that with it set to show icons only and set to small icons, the toolbar takes up no more space than it used to, while having the ability to add to it icons and functionality that either didn't (and perhaps couldn't?) exist in the vertical status area (eg. QuickFind), or that could replace other buttons that we might otherwise have included on the layout instead.
Not necessarily trying to take a side here. Just curious to hear more people's thoughts on it.
And perhaps the info above helps some...
David Thorp
All About Abundance Pty Ltd
Sydney / Brisbane. Australia.
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On 12/12/2010, at 2:48 PM, Richard S. Russell wrote:
> On 2010 Dec 11, at 21:31, David Thorp wrote:
>
>> So yeah... I'm not trying to be a smartarse, but I really want to understand why this is such an issue, given the points I've made above. Enlighten me?
>
>
> Well, as I wrote earlier, it's not a BIG issue, it's an annoyance. And, as I also wrote earlier, it's more than offset by the auto-numbering feature for tabs. (Other people may have their own favorite compensations, like script triggering.)
>
> But the reason that it IS an issue is that it could be better — has BEEN better, in fact — and isn't that generally what we mean by "issue"?
>
> I don't object to the horizontality so much as I do the utter waste of space involved. I could design a better interface in under 2 hours, and I bet most of you could, too. For a sterling example of GOOD space usage, look at the menu bar which has been standard across the top of every GUI OS screen since the very 1st Macintosh back in 1984 — a veritable paradigm of successful design, elegantly combining power, intuitive understandability, and compactness. That's the standard FMI should aspire to ... and which I normally expect them to deliver.
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