Lack of consistency in menus across all three betas

[Old Bruce]

Affinity Designer beta

-------------------

Affinity Photo beta

---------------------------

Affinity Publisher beta

----------------------------

I find it very frustrating. I hardly ever use the Apple Colour Picker.

[fde101]

The second one (Photo) makes the least sense.

Either of the other two seem at least somewhat reasonable.

[ronnyb]

Alphabetical order is great. I've also requested this for the Adjustments pop-up menu in the Layers Studio.

[fde101]

13 hours ago, ronnyb said:

Alphabetical order is great.

Not always... 

For these particular menu sections it might work out, but you really want to keep closely related items grouped together and in a logical order.

"Apple Color Picker" and "Assistant Manager" are not particularly closely related (logically) to each other or to the other items in the list.  If they happened to fall alphabetically between "Grid and Axis Manager" and ""Guides Manager" I would not want to order them that way because the "Grid and Axis Manager" and the "Guides manager" are much more closely related to each other than to either of those other options.  In this instance it would work out, but not in all cases.

Also, I'm not sure that "Apple Color Picker" belongs in the "View" menu at all... but looking at the other places it could be, it doesn't really fit anywhere else either.

 

The "Studio" submenu should almost certainly be in the "Window" menu not the "View" menu.

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, fde101 said:

The "Studio" submenu should almost certainly be in the "Window" menu not the "View" menu.

I would disagree with that placement. Studio turns display items on and off, which is a View function not a Window-management function like the other items under Window.

(However, having Studio as a separate top-level menu has been suggested, too, and I agree with that.)

[fde101]

3 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Studio turns display items on and off

Those "display items" are in effect windows themselves, so it is opening and closing specific windows.

According to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, such items belong in the Window menu.

Items in the View menu are supposed to be items that customize the appearance of windows, treating all windows of the same type the same way.

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/menus/menu-bar-menus/

 

Seems to me that most of what the Affinity apps put in the View menu doesn't really belong there.

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, fde101 said:

Those "display items" are in effect windows themselves, so it is opening and closing specific windows.

Thanks, but I'll disagree with that, too.

Windows are what hold the documents we're working on. The studio panels hold controls for the application, that can apply to any (document) Window that is currently open.

[fde101]

Just now, walt.farrell said:

Windows are what hold the documents we're working on.

Those would be document windows.

 

1 minute ago, walt.farrell said:

The studio panels hold controls for the application

Thus being panels, which are another type of window - again, this is defined in the Human Interface Guidelines under "Types of Windows":

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/windows-and-views/window-anatomy/