More On NetNewsWire

I have to give another congratulations to the NetNewsWire team – I just realized I’d been taking advantage of a very simple but very clever piece of user interface design.  The contextual menu in the NetNewsWire browser has two “Reload” menu items in it, one at the top and one at the bottom.

Regardless of where you click on the page and whether or not the contextual menu pops up or pops down from your mouse cursor, the reload item is always right next to your cursor so it’s easy to hit.  Now you might think that it would be better to just detect which way the contextual menu popped and move the refresh menu item to that end, or even flip the entire menu so that the distance to all the items is unaffected by how the menu pops.  The downside of doing that though is that it makes it much harder to find the items because they keep moving around.  With the duplicated item, the menu is always the same so it’s very quick to identify which way it popped and then move to the item while still keeping the most commonly used item close at hand.

Someone obviously put a lot of thought into that feature.  I’m impressed.