Re: Application names in menus

[snickell stanford edu]

Quoting 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. 

Actually, this interface is one of three I am exploring for this (and
the most unorthodox). I was reminded of it by some shots of an OS/2
widget that did this that Gregory showed me a couple months ago. It has
the interesting property that it makes it very obvious how to get the
"full list" and works more directly rather than the "most obvious"
approach (to pop up a "which menus to show" preference dialogue). The
downside is, well, its a little unconventional.

This would be a bad idea if it used a standard "cascading" arrow
indicator. Lots of people would not click it. If, however, the indicator
were more subtle it could work well.

> 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)

We need to make this configurable anyway, if only for distributions.

-Seth