Re: [Audacity-quality] Align Tracks Together (with labels)

[Steve t. F. <ste...@gm...>]

On 21 May 2013 21:08, Gale Andrews <ga...@au...> wrote:
>
> | From Steve the Fiddle <ste...@gm...>
> | Tue, 21 May 2013 19:53:03 +0100
> | Subject: [Audacity-quality] Align Tracks Together (with labels)
>> On 21 May 2013 10:03, David Bailes <drb...@go...> wrote:
>> > On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Gale Andrews <ga...@au...>
>> > wrote:
> [...]
>
>> I'm not very keen on
>> "Align Start to Selection Start or Cursor"
>> as the name of a menu item due to its length
>
> Adding the word "Start" barely increases the overall width
> of the sub-menu, given the other items.
>
>
>> "Align Start and Move Cursor to Selection Start or Cursor"
>> is imo unacceptably long.
>
> I agree, but I wasn't asking for that. I assume the "Align and
> Move Cursor" sub-menu commands would be identical to the
> "Align Tracks" sub-menu commands, as now.

David was complaining that the command names were the same, so it is
difficult to distinguish in the keyboard preferences whether a command
is part of the "Align Tracks" sub menu or the "Align and Move" sub
menu. To resolve that problem the names in "Align and Move" would need
to be distinctly different to the names in "Align Tracks".


>
> But I think the second menu item could be called "Align Tracks
> and Move Cursor" for clarity.
>
>
>> When I'm looking for an item in a menu, I want  to be able to quickly
>> scan down a list of short but meaningful command names and pick out
>> the appropriate one. I don't want to read a functional description of
>> each option. If I'm unsure exactly what a function does then I can
>> either try it out and discover for myself, or look it up in the
>> manual.
>
> Yes but normal users probably don't try things out and certainly
> don't read the Manual. How many times do we point users to
> those Align commands and they say, yes they are useful, but
> they did not understand them so did not try them?
>
> It's always a balance of brevity and clarity. I'm quite sure "Align
> to" is not ideally clear, though I think it's just about acceptable.
>
> "From" is not acceptable IMO. It's confusing, and it's a name
> change (for the worse) when the functionality has not changed.

Perhaps it a regional dialect thing, but to me "from" indicates a
starting point ("where have you come from?") and "to" indicates a
detination ("where are you going to?").

The ".... zero" alignment starts at zero.
"From only $1.99" means that the starting price is $1.99.

I don't see the confusion - to me it seems a lot more clear than
aligning "with", which in itself gives no indication whether the
alignment goes up to the alignment point or proceeds from the
alignment point, thus requiring additional words to specify which is
meant.



>
>
>> Looking in other applications it is unusual to have menu commands that
>> have names that are more than 3 words. Firefox has two menu commands
>> that have 4 words and all of the other command names of 3 or less
>> words (mostly one or two words). kDevelop is a complex program with a
>> very extensive menu system, but even that program has only 2 menu
>> commands with 5 words - all the rest are shorter and the vast majority
>> have two words. In contrast, Audacity, with its fairly modest number
>> of menu items (not including plug-ins) currently has 25 menu commands
>> with 4 or more words.
>
> I suggest kDevelop is irrelevant to our discussions - it's not an
> app for normal users.

It was a "random" example that happened to be in front of my nose.
Other examples:
* Gimp: the longest menu item is 4 words,
* Internet Explorer 8 has one occurrence of a 6 word item ("What's New
in Internet Explorer 8") and the next longest is 4 words,
* Foobar2000 has one 5 word item, one 4 word item and the rest are 3
words or less.

Audacity is conspicuously more verbose than other programs.

Steve

>
>
>> Good design should be concise. Imo overly long names are ugly,
>> confusing, look complicated, make it harder to find the command that
>> you are looking for, and are a nightmare for anyone that has dyslexia
>> (or even mild reading difficulty).
>
> I agree in principle, but these align commands are not easy to
> understand and are trying to push a lot of commands into the
> sub-menu.  There are no menu items of comparable complexity
> in Firefox.
>
> If you don't repeat the word from the menu item in the
> sub-menu items, then when you have a sub menu with eight or
> more items the greater danger is losing the plot of what the
> commands do by the time you get to the bottom of the list.
>
> And then if you have a menu item underneath that does the
> same (align) and one thing extra (move cursor), it gets
> really unclear if you don't have "Align" in that submenu.
>
> "Or" is only one character more then "/".
>
> And "to" is less characters than "from".
>
>
>
> Gale
>
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