Re: Proposed module: gnome-main-menu

["Iain *" <iaingnome gmail com>]

On 1/9/07, Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com> wrote:

> In short, what's your expected effect on the GNOME desktop when it's
> using slab?

I think its safe to say that the current gnome applications menus
system is pretty screwed up. Every distro changes it around, renames
categories comes up with their own way to prevent the menus getting
disorganised and to help people find what they're looking for, people
want to edit and change them (witness how much crap GNOME as a project
took because there was no menu editor for ages...) away from the
defaults

I think these show us that people don't want to see every application
installed on their computers all the time: they just want to get at
the applications they want to use as quickly as possible.

This is without thinking about the problems with the
concept/implementation of menus in themselves. I have a hard time
being comfortable with using a menu on my laptop with the touchpad,
fingers slide too far, closing the menu I want. It just doesn't feel
nice.

In my opinion these problems are eliminated when using slab. The
applications I want are at a flick of the cursor to the top left of
the screen and with a much larger surface area so I don't have to be
as accurate with my trackpad. They are user editted without needing
some weird psuedo tree editor.

As for it looking different to other things in GNOME, I actually think
that the look and the use of colour is a step in the right direction
to a more modern look. I think many of the ways colour is used in
Vista and OSX are things that we should consider for GNOME to make it
a more pleasing environment than flat gunmetal grey windows.

Some people aren't actually comparing the slab to the menus, but to a
panel full of launchers, which I don't think an overly fair
comparison. To be compared to the menus they are replacing, slab is a
different concept, but one that I for one feel more comfortable using,
and if Novell's usability tests are anything to go by so do others.

Now there are issues I have with it...

* the lack of a places equivalent - but (at least, there may be
others) Ubuntu have added another entry to the combo box to deal with
that.
* Knowing the best way to initially populate the favourite
applications panel (or whatever it should be called).

There are other small things but they are stylistic and hardly showstoppers.

iain