More than 90% of the computing world are not familiar with OS X' peculiarities. Introducing such peculiarities in GNOME will not only disorient its current users, but it will also confuse new users to the environment. If GNOME is to copy any feature from another platform, let's copy something that 90% of the computing world already understands and not a feature unique to a niche platform. The element of least surprise should the usability principle at play here.
On Sun, 2005-04-03 at 23:56 +0200, Frederik Hertzum wrote:
> At the section of GNOME's wiki about 3.0 it is disccused how to give the
> deskop a more "objected" feel to it - one big issue seems to be menus. A
> suggestion on the wiki is that menus should resemble the menus in apples Mac
> OS desktops -however someone apparantly thinks that users in general will
> not like this.
I'd much rather prefer Gnome to go the OSX way with this-- I find that
system making the desktop very clean, and clear; the menus are always in
the same place and you always know where to find them-- whereas with
other DEs it depends on where your currently active window resides.
Secondly, it reduces clutter quite drastically; for instance, look at
this screenshot I just made:
http://img229.exs.cx/img229/8591/screenshot2eq.png
As you can see, there are three basically the same menu bars located so
close to each other it makes it look confusing and utterly cluttered.
Now compare the above screenshot to this one:
http://img34.exs.cx/img34/7009/uygyug6av.png
It looks less cluttered; there's one single menu bar that sits nicely on
top, and it's always there. What's the use in seeing the menus of
windows that aren't active? You will only be able to use those menus
when the window is activated anyway!
I'm not trying to glorify OSX here or anything (OSX has its share of
flaws), but the way it handles menus is quite superior to others, in my
humble opinion of course, so it might be a good idea to take OSX/Finder
as a starting point on this one.
Thom Holwerda
---
Main news posting guy of http://www.expert-zone.com, bringing you the
OS/computer news that matters
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