- There are up to 4 levels of cascading menus, so it can take a long time to reach the desired setting. However, once you've ticked the desired option, all menus vanish ; if you want to change some other settings (which would be a logical thing to do, for instance when installing or updating the software), you have to begin all over again from the top of the selection chain : click again on Options, scroll down to the desired sub-menu, click again, etc. Allowing for the inevitable mistakes, you could be walking up and down that menu ladder ten times in a single session.
- The cascading menu system is a sort of (bad) video game, because you never know where the desired function will appear : where on earth is that function ? in fact, what are the offered options ? does that sub-menu have another sub-menu ? will it pop up on the right or on the left of my present menu ? also, what's the global logic of it ? So you keep chasing menu options up and down, right and left with your mouse. It's funny once, then it quickly gets on your nerves.
- You can't make notes of your settings, nor take a screenshot of them in order to document your own install of Cinta Notes.
Whereas with the near-universal system of a Preferences or Settings window one can find now in many, many programs :
- You click the Options menu, click the Preferences or Settings command, and then you enter Preferences mode : a static Preferences window opens, which shows you all the options and sub-options available, through a tab system and/or a tree system.
- Clicking on a tab, or checking a box, leaves the Preferences window open. You can rummage about and experiment.
- An Apply button allows you to view the effects of an attempted change, without committing to it and closing the window. An OK button saves all changes made and closes the window.
- You can also add a Restore Defaults button, and even a couple of Export/Import Settings buttons.
- The complete hierarchy of choices is permanently displayed while the window is open, so you can familiarise yourself with it just by looking at it.
Here is one example of this principle at work in the Everything search tool, but I'm sure you can find many others :
https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/options
If such an option is retained, it remains to be seen where a Preferences command should be shown. At present, the top Options menu only has those possible Preferences. I have used software where the top Options menu directly opened a Preferences window, and I tend to find this destabilising. It seems to me that when you click on the menu bar of a program, you expect it to drop with a selection of choices. If all menus behave like that except one, this is, I think, bad form.
On the other hand, if you click Options and the drop-down menu only offers Preferences, that's ridiculous and a waste of time.
So an Options menu should have a Preferences command, and then other ones. Alternatively, if other commands are simply not needed there, an Options-or-Preferences command could just be integrated in the File menu.
Besides, the File menu presently has a Backup command which partly belongs to Preferences, in my opinion. The tick-boxes Backup Hourly/Daily/Weekly are typically user preferences.