How Mac Menus Got Complicated
The original Mac’s menus and its always-present menu bar were a spiffy thing in 1984. Up until then, most computer users had to memorize lots of commands, and then laboriously type those commands to get something done.
Menus blew away that memory burden. Instead of having to be stashed in your memory, nearly all of an app’s commands were stashed in menus, categorized neatly. Want to know what file-handling commands are available? Pull down the File menu and take a look.
That worked. Until it didn’t.
The Case of the Overburdened Memory
Menus are great—until you have an app with many hundreds of commands tucked away in its menus. At that point, you’re no longer asking yourself “what is the command for…” but “where ...
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