Re: Recently used applications

[Dave Bordoley <bordoley msu edu>]

On Mon, 2002-10-28 at 20:50, John McCutchan wrote:
>
> A comment I got was "I hate having to search through the menus just to find 
> my movie player".
> 


Maybe I should elaborate on my reasoning for not wanting this feature.

First some comments on menu structure. With the current layout of the
gnome menu, we only have two levels of hierarchy, the main applications
drop down menu and one level of sub-menus. For example to browse the web
the user only has to click on Applications, search for the internet
category and than select web browser. Contrast the same action with
windows in which the user needs to select start => programs => mozilla
=> mozilla web browser (there are examples of even deeper hierarchy in
windows). 

Deep hierarchies in the windows menu layout are most likely the reason
that microsoft added the recent apps feature (using their menus is very
hard, they knew this and tried to make it incrementally better).
Contrast that to the lack of hierarchy in the gnome menu layout (plus
our really good categorization and tool based names, ie web browser, not
mozilla). How is accessing an app(say a web browser) in Applications =>
Recent => web browser(an arbitrary category who's contents are not well
defined and may change) any faster than applications => internet => web
browser (this menu is static and always contains the same items in the
same order).  

Basically my view is that gnome does not suffer from the usability flaws
that make the recent apps feature necessary (we have a very shallow menu
hierarchy, and for bonus points we have good categorization and app
naming).

dave