I don't understand why you want to access different menu options for different applications in rapid succession. Or, if you do (e.g. to open each application's Preferences dialogue box?), why each application's menu bar being in a different place would help you do this. Surely there's more mousing around?
(Acorn's Risc OS, that ran on the Archimedes and Risc PC series of computers, had a three-button mouse and used the middle button for 'Menu', so you could click anywhere in an application's window, or in its Icon bar [sort of dock homologue] icon, and get a menu, which avoided all of this hunting down the application menu problem. At the expense of all menus being multi-level, and requiring you to have and understand multiple buttons on a mouse.)
It's not that you necessarily want them all in quick succession, it's that you might want to go directly from app A to the menu of app B.
Disassociating the controls from the application is bad. Forcing all the controls on top of each other is bad. The usability improvement in "making the target larger" by giving it infinite vertical space without increasing horizontal space is very much *not* enough to offset the usability decline.
You keep on begging the question. Of course, if the only true way to do things is "the menu bar must be attached to the main window of an application", then it logically follows that Mac OS disassociates the controls from the application. (I'm not sure if it necessarily follows from there that it "forces all the controls on top of each other", though, given that you can only ever see one menu bar at once. It's not like you could misclick and accidentally get the wrong application's Help menu, say.)
Conversely, though, if you assume that the menu bar must always be at the top of the screen and change depending on which application is active, then you will indeed be confused when confronted with a number of Windows applications not running full-screen, where the menu bar jumps around from one part of the screen to another depending on which application you're in. (That's if you have a menu bar at all, visible or invisible, but that's another UI issue.)
(As an aside, if you have all windows maximised, then barring menu bar skulduggery from applications perhaps trying to be too clever, your menu bar will indeed always be in the same place at the top of the screen, just like a Mac. I've seen enough people do this that I suspect there might be a reason for it - other than the historically bad multi-level window concept that Windows started out with, which made it difficult to interleave windows from different applications, and therefore difficult to compare windows side by side or drag and drop between two apps).
As for going directly from application A to the menu of application B, is your point really that it's hard to switch applications unless you can click on another application's menu bar? I mean, let's say that for some reason you decided that what you wanted to do in another application was to choose a non-trivial menu option (not, say, Quit or Exit, which there are common shortcuts in both Windows and Mac OS for), but not make sure that you had first put the cursor in the right place in the second application's document, or selected some part of that document. (In which case you're trying to switch to another window, do things, then find a menu option, at which point your mouse pointer is so far away from where it started off that where the menu bar of the second application is is probably a moot point.) Are you actually saying that you make a point, in your everyday life, of lining up your windows in such a way that you can see each of their menu bars from other windows? Not just some part of the window so you can click on it, but the entirety of the menu bar?
I really do think that being able to rely on the menu bar always being in the same place (a region which is easy to get to from wherever your mouse pointer might be), and as consistent as possible (e.g. File, Edit, Help share basic similarities in every application, Preferences is always in the same place rather than randomly being under Edit, Tools or Options) is a big win.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-17 04:47 pm (UTC)(Acorn's Risc OS, that ran on the Archimedes and Risc PC series of computers, had a three-button mouse and used the middle button for 'Menu', so you could click anywhere in an application's window, or in its Icon bar [sort of dock homologue] icon, and get a menu, which avoided all of this hunting down the application menu problem. At the expense of all menus being multi-level, and requiring you to have and understand multiple buttons on a mouse.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-17 05:25 pm (UTC)Disassociating the controls from the application is bad. Forcing all the controls on top of each other is bad. The usability improvement in "making the target larger" by giving it infinite vertical space without increasing horizontal space is very much *not* enough to offset the usability decline.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-17 08:04 pm (UTC)Conversely, though, if you assume that the menu bar must always be at the top of the screen and change depending on which application is active, then you will indeed be confused when confronted with a number of Windows applications not running full-screen, where the menu bar jumps around from one part of the screen to another depending on which application you're in. (That's if you have a menu bar at all, visible or invisible, but that's another UI issue.)
(As an aside, if you have all windows maximised, then barring menu bar skulduggery from applications perhaps trying to be too clever, your menu bar will indeed always be in the same place at the top of the screen, just like a Mac. I've seen enough people do this that I suspect there might be a reason for it - other than the historically bad multi-level window concept that Windows started out with, which made it difficult to interleave windows from different applications, and therefore difficult to compare windows side by side or drag and drop between two apps).
As for going directly from application A to the menu of application B, is your point really that it's hard to switch applications unless you can click on another application's menu bar? I mean, let's say that for some reason you decided that what you wanted to do in another application was to choose a non-trivial menu option (not, say, Quit or Exit, which there are common shortcuts in both Windows and Mac OS for), but not make sure that you had first put the cursor in the right place in the second application's document, or selected some part of that document. (In which case you're trying to switch to another window, do things, then find a menu option, at which point your mouse pointer is so far away from where it started off that where the menu bar of the second application is is probably a moot point.) Are you actually saying that you make a point, in your everyday life, of lining up your windows in such a way that you can see each of their menu bars from other windows? Not just some part of the window so you can click on it, but the entirety of the menu bar?
I really do think that being able to rely on the menu bar always being in the same place (a region which is easy to get to from wherever your mouse pointer might be), and as consistent as possible (e.g. File, Edit, Help share basic similarities in every application, Preferences is always in the same place rather than randomly being under Edit, Tools or Options) is a big win.