Re: Application names in menus

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel liebesgedichte net>]

On Fri, 2002-08-02 at 03:59, snickell stanford edu wrote:
> > 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.

Is "doing it like Nautilus mime type handling" part of your three? This
was the first that came to my mind. Other choices for "Webbrowser" could
appear in the context menu of the item like "Launch Galeon", "Launch
Opera", "Launch Mozilla", etc and an option "Configure Defaults" or
something similar which would show a list of all installed applications
of this type and let the user choose either "default" or "in menu/ not
in menu" for each app, similar to the "Open with Other Application"
dialog of Nautilus. This would allow Opera fans to just quickly set it
as default and webdesigners to set Galeon as default and put Opera and
Konqueror in the menu.

Disadvantage is that it probably wouldn't be obvious that you have to
right click the item to get different choices. So a new widget like you
suggested would probably be better (with the disadvantage of beeing less
consistent with the rest of the desktop and of course the requirement of
a new widget).


- Daniel