Re: Application menu.

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 04:28, 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.
> 
> The balance may well be different when we have even 5% or 10%
> marketshare vs. Windows, but right now I think you want to make people
> feel warm and cozy and not too radical when they adopt a non-Microsoft
> desktop.
> 
> Think of it as coating people's UI medicine in a bit of sugar. ;-)


Well, just a thought... What about placing this application menu to the
right instead, in place of the current "Help"?
Then the position of "File" (and all other items) would never change,
also the "Help" and "About" items would roughly stay at the same place,
with "Quit" and "Preferences" being the only items to move. 
This shouldn't be very intimidating to new users, I think, but still
have the advantage of a good place for items like about and preferences.

Daniel