Chapter 11. The app bar
This chapter covers
- The app bar and buttons
- Using the app bar for navigation
- Popups and menus
It may be hard to imagine applications without toolbars, but prior to the mid–Windows 3.1 timeframe, they were uncommon in GUIs. The original Apple Macintosh (and the Xerox technology it was based on) and clearly derivative GEOS, all with their single menu bar at the top, plus the Amiga Workbench and Windows 1.x with flat menus per window together established the menu navigation standard. None of them made real use of toolbars.
Eventually, applications got more complicated, and their menus became overly complex, making it difficult to find common tasks. With the rise in screen resolution, more screen real estate became available, and toolbars became commonplace. Eventually this got out of control, especially in complex applications like Microsoft Word where, if you displayed all the available toolbars, you’d end up with a tiny sliver of real estate available for content. I remember visiting my parents one year and their Word toolbars looked just like that, but they had no idea how they got that way. Oh, and don’t get me started on all the installed Internet Explorer toolbars they had. Even in a well-maintained toolbar, the number of options got to be so many that the same problems we had with discovering items in complex menus started to surface in toolbars. We simply pushed the problem around.