Re: Application menu.

[Seth Nickell <seth gnome org>]

On Mon, 2003-09-15 at 05:30, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-09-15 at 13:18, iain wrote:
> 
> > What are people's views on an "Application Menu" in each program? By
> > application menu, I mean a menu like on Macs, with the "iTunes" menu
> > before the File menu.
> 
> It certainly came up from time to time when we were originally writing
> the HIG, but I don't recall off the top of my head why we steered away
> from it... will have to do some digging.

Various contingents were concerned about making too many "big changes"
to what was GNOME's standard practice. We decided that other changes
were either more urgent (better done early than late) or were more
important. In general I think its a good idea, though there are many new
design issues that come up, particularly in the context of not having a
global window bar and have the first menu item have fixed width so File
is still in a constant position (which I would guess OS/X does, though I
haven't actually looked).

To me the most valuable contribution is that it provides a good home for
a few very common menu items that have no logical placement: quit,
about, and preferences. I'm not sure this desire for a "pure" menu
system justifies the change, but I'm mildly in favour of it overall.

-Seth