"Desktop preferences" as a top-level item

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

I'm splitting this into a seperate thread since its on a somewhat
different topic and so we don't end up with a giant thread full of
rabbit trails.

Bill wrote:
> 
> I do think that the current menu may bury appearance stuff too deeply,
I
> would propose moving 'Desktop Preferences' to be a toplevel menu
instead
> of putting it under 'Applications'.

"Desktop Preferences" is too long to be a toplevel item, we could put it
in as "Preferences". I don't have a major objection to this, and agree
that its conceptually cleaner than having Preferences under
"Applications". Nils and I originally had something like this but shied
away for various reasons (mostly that we felt it was promoting
preferences to greater prominence than was useful). In retrospect I
think its better to put it in a top level.

> But I don't see any reason why 'Desktop->Appearance->Fonts' is unclear
> or hard-to-find.  If you are worried about losing the menu item named
> 'Fonts' (by making it a notebook tab in a more general appearance
> capplet), then I don't see a problem with having two paths to the same
> capplet.

1) I don't think its too bad to have these preference pages be tabs in a
single window, but....

2) Its important that they each have their own menu entries (and
nautilus entry, of course) and that there not be a launchable entry for
the global area "appearance".

That said, since there's not a launcher for "appearance", I think its
pretty useless to have these all be pages in the same window, and I'd
rather spare the complexity of putting tabbed-items as menu entries.

WRT an "Appearance" category... I think these preference items will be
some of the most commonly accessed. They are certainely some of the
simplest and easiest to understand. I would be much happier, e.g.,
trying to move other items into sub-categories and leaving only
appearance related items in the top-level category. 

Also appearance is somewhat ambiguous. Should "Menus and Toolbars" be in
there? That's certainely *related* to appearance? heh, There used to be
lots more examples of ambiguous items, but we cleaned lots of crack out
of the CC :-)

-Seth