Re: Application names in menus

[textshell neutronstar dyndns org]

On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 04:03:02PM -0700, snickell stanford edu wrote:
> But for other things. Say having two word processors. Well, if you're
> going to install them, I think you should put them in the same place. To
> do otherwise will probably end up being rather confusing. As you point
> out, its worth considering if you could install only one, but that's not
> *always* going to be the right answer.

A nice (but unorthodox) solution(depends on gtk feature request bugzilla:82162):
Have a cascading submenu if more than one word processor is installed. But keep
the submenu activatable. If the user selects the entry that opens the cascading
submenu for the word processors the standard one is launched. If he expand the
submenu he has the choice of all installed word processors, the standard one is
marked in an obious way to minimize confusion(e.g. bold face).

Ok, I admit this is not what we know from windows and it might need some real
world user testing, but it could be a solution. The big question still is, how
to select the default application. This might be something that has to be
configurable (but please preconfigured by the distro or site admin)

> 
> One idea I've been toying around with in conjunction with the tasks
> based menu (since applications could register themselves as handling
> generic tasks like "can create spreadsheet") is allowing some sort of
> filtering in the menus. So there's a preference page that allows you to
> choose the preferred web browser, e-mailer, word processor, spreadsheet,
>  chat program, whatever. GNOME by default shows only your preferred item
> in the menus then with the generic name. Then allow people to turn on
> other menu items that fill that category manually (this probably isn't
> too common, but there are cases like web designers who need to view
> their work in a couple different browsers say). I'm not sure yet how to
> make the "turn on" functional obvious, non-annoying, and non-crack, but
> I think/hope it can be done.

Your right, some user choice is needed here. But that's the real hard part. 'My'
approch with cascading menus would be obvious, but it depend wheter user use the
shortcut (directly select the category) or not.

> 
> This is also a good solution for administered multi-user systems. You
> don't want to have every application in the world visible in every
> user's menus because the menus would overload. On the other hand, people
> do have strong opinions about which application they want to use (and
> since they're not administering that machine, if that app isn't
> installed they can't use it). This way the machine default could have
> "Web browser" set to Mozilla, but the 5% of users who really like Opera
> could set their preferred web browser to opera: without inflicting the
> burden of another menu entry on the users who don't care about opera.
> 

Good point.

> It also might be a good solution for distros who want to ship non-crack
> default setups for people who just want to "browse the web" or "read
> email", while still accomodating the diversity of application choice
> that proliferates in the Linux community.
> 
> -Seth
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