unifying application menu entries

[Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>]

This issue has already been discussed on the gnome-de list for a
particular application but it's important to find a general solution:
We need to have descriptive intuitive menu entries for all our
applications. At the moment there are some ways of notation.

Ex. 1:
Galeon Webbrowser
Browse the web

Ex. 2:
Mergeant
DBMS admin tool

So I here are a few proposals:

1.

Ex. 1:
Webbrowser (Galeon)
Browse the web

Ex. 2:
DBMS admin tool (Mergeant)
Administrate databases through DBMS

2.

Ex. 1:
Webbrowser
Galeon - Browse the web

Ex. 2:
DBMS admin tool
Mergeant - Administrate databases through DBMS


3.

Ex. 1:
Galeon
Webbrowser

Ex. 2:
Mergeant
DBMS admin tool

4.

1.

Ex. 1:
Galeon (Webbrowser)
Browse the web

Ex. 2:
Mergeant (DBMS admin tool)
Administrate databases through DBMS

I was told that in KDE 3.0.x they solve it as described under 4 except
that one can crop the descriptions in brackets and they have no
additional tooltip.

I have no experience with such usability things but I think it's not a
good idea to add a possibility to change this in the control center.
Maybe we could add a gconf entry (similar to
/apps/metacity/general/button_layout) where one can define the layout he
wants like "name - desc : longdesc" where : is the seperator between the
entry and the tooltip and which would result in

Galeon - Webbrowser
Browse the web

"longdesc" would show

Browse the web

but neither the application name nor the short description.
That would allow experienced users to change this to match their
preferences in an extremely flexible. It's way to late for 2.x but I
think it's worth to consider for 2.2.
Oh, and of course we need to have a default way of presenting our menu
entries.

Comments, please :)

regs,
 Chris