Menu overview

Taligent has designed a floating menu palette. At the highest level, the palette is a vertical list of the available main menus:

Services provides access to global services such as printing and in later releases, faxing, mail, and help. When multiple Place representations are supported, the items on the Services menu will be those that span Place representations. (A place-specific service should appear on the Place menu.)
Document provides access to commands that apply to the active container.
Edit provides access to commands for changing the contents of the current selection, such as Cut, Copy, and Paste.
Window provides access to commands that apply to windows. Currently, the window commands support hiding and displaying windows. At this time, you cannot use the Window menu to manipulate windows from different documents; for example, a list of all open windows in the Workspace cannot be displayed.
File provides access to commands that apply to files, such as creating stationery and opening presentation.
Special provides access to commands such as emptying the trash and shutting down the system.
Filter provides access to commands that affect what types of objects are displayed in the Workspace.
CleanUp provides access to commands that organize the icons displayed in the Workspace.

Menu model

The main menus approximate a hierarchy of contexts. The goal is to provide as much information to the user as possible about the active context. This is especially important because the CommonPoint menus are designed to be dynamic--the contents of menus and submenus will change to reflect the current context.

Updating to reflect the active context is an extension of the object-action paradigm that is central to the CommonPoint interface. In this syntax, the user carries out commands by first selecting the target object and then choosing the command to act on the object. Selecting the object sets the active context, determining which commands are available to the user.

NOTE In the current release, the menu items are not dynamic. In a future release, menu items such as Undo, Cut, and Move to Trash are planned to be updated to reflect the active context.

Additional menus

As a developer, you can provide additional context-sensitive menus for items that do not fit on the standard set. These menus will often apply to the current selection, so they should appear after the Edit menu and before the Window menu.

To minimize context-based menu flicker, the ordering of menus should be stable wherever possible. The Services, Document, and Edit menus are likely to be available in most contexts, so their order should remain constant. By placing new menus the Edit menu, the user has only to check one location for new menus.

When you are creating additional menus and submenus, do not descend more than three levels (include the main menu palette as the first level).

Disabled states

Although the menu palette changes with the current context, there are instances when a menu or menu items are unavailable and are dimmed. As a developer, you can disable commands, which will appear dimmed.

Capitalization

Menu names should be one word and begin with a capital letter. The name should encapsulate the commands listed on the menu.

The names of menu items should be one or two words. Use title-style capitalization for menu items. This style capitalizes every word except articles (a, an, and the), coordinating conjunctions (for example, and, or) and prepositions of three or fewer letters (except when the preposition is part of a verb phrase, such as Set Up).

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