Re: Recently used applications

[Andrew Sobala <andrew sobala net>]

Dave Bordoley wrote:
> 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).  

Let's look at my RH8-derived menu. I installed Gnome and KDE, so I've
often got 2 tools for the same job.

The accessories menu - where most applications go - scrolls. By default.
What about when I install even more applications that I want to use? And
don't get me started on the games menu.

I think Gnome's lack-of-hierarchy is a good thing, because finding an
accessory is difficult when it could be in any submenu. However, when
your most commonly-used-app starts with z (or maybe it's gedit, "Text
Editor")..... a recently used apps menu starts to become very useful.

-- 
Andrew

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