>It is a personal pet peeve of mine when a developer has gone through great lengths to make his app colorful, and full of icon and pictures, but the end result is still an unintuitive, confusing, anything-but-standard app. Have you used Acrobat Reader 3.0? All of the browser functionality lives in toolbar buttons with NO F***ING TOOLTIPS! The authors carefully chose cute little pictures for every button on the toolbar, but the user has to guess what each one does. There are simply not enough pixels in most toolbar buttons to allow a picture that decriptively explains what the buttons does.
>
>And the lack of menus in an app does away with the ability of a user to become a "power user", because shortcut keys, if they exist, are not easily discoverable. Windows standards say that any functionality available in a toolbar should be duplicated in a menu item somewhere, and I think this is great policy.
>
>Just my .12

One thing I achieved easily in FPD was to tame the menus into staying open. We used to have rather rich menu structure, specially in the reporting part (sometimes three or even four levels deep), and having the user to drill down the menu tree each time was too much. Actually, even trying to remember where something in a menu was, was also hard to do for a novice. I remember I had this trouble with Word, when I started using it - it's hard to adopt the author's logic of categorizing things into popups (why does page numbering start with Insert menu bar, but needs to go to View to edit it).

A menu which would stay open untill specifically closed (by either clicking outside of it, or simply pressing escape if no form is open) is something I couldn't do in VFP - but I've seen people do it using toolbars with buttons (non-graphic sometimes) for a Lotus-style menu, or with a TreeView (as I did it). In FPD I did it by creating the popups on the fly, in a separate routine which actually got called by the upper level popup or a menu bar - but it needed knowing the coordinates of where to draw it. It was easy to recalculate in character mode, and rather impossible to do in pixel mode.

Currently, I'm using either a treeview or a combination of a treeview and a standard menu, plus a toolbar for most frequently used tasks. I'm also thinking of a Toolbars right-click menu, which would enable the user to create her own toolbars in order to call forms at wish.

No question here, except whether someone knows a magic clause to keep three levels of menu/popups open.