Re: Application menu.

[Seth Nickell <seth gnome org>]

On Wed, 2003-09-17 at 19:28, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-09-17 at 06:13, Seth Nickell wrote:
> > 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.
> > 
> 
> This is always where I come in and say, you really do want people to try
> GNOME and say "well this feels fairly familiar" (where familiar =
> similar to Windows). It doesn't have to really be similar to Windows in
> any deep way, but if it's similar in cosmetic ways that don't really
> matter very much, it makes people a lot more comfortable with it without
> hurting usability.
> 
> Seems like keeping File on the left gives people lots of warm fuzzies
> about similarity with little cost UI-wise.

I suspect in this case that the change will be so trivial to learn that
it won't have much negative effect. It'll probably make more sense to a
lot of people than the windows way, and may help straighten out some of
the document vs. app mental twistiness Windows has caused. But all in
all, I agree that this definitely isn't the most critical change in the
world, and it does have some downsides.

-Seth