Re: Window titles

[Jud Craft <craftjml gmail com>]

>> We will have an application menu at the top of the screen that will
>> serve the purpose of identifying the application.
>
> Huh.
>
> A what?
>
> Is this like the Global Menu (that works great, incidentally) that was
> just rejected by release-team GNOME since it wasn't compatible with
> GNOME Shell?

Minor side-note:  the "Application menu" in Shell is similar to
the...well, to the Application menu that is part of gnome-global-menu.
 It shows the current application.

I like Global-Menu -- it's like the most functional GTK menu hack out
there -- but it -should- be torpedoed.

The reason is because their method (retrieving the GTK menus over
D-Bus) is inherently limited.  It only supports basic menu options.
Try using Banshee for example -- the cool formatting in menus (bold,
italic) and the extra widgets (like the rating menu option) are
broken, because it doesn't fit the "icon + label" menu choice paradigm
that they use.

So it's a cool toy, but a -true- global menu needs to be just as
flexible as real GTK menus.  They really need to reform Global Menu to
be a specification that can be used by a program (Similar to how GTK
on Mac OSX specifies one line of code needed to integrate with the OS
X global menu, that Banshee and MonoDevelop use -- this API should be
supported with Global Menu instead of a dumb but cool hack).

In addition, although the whole "applets don't fit into Shell" thing
is a problem, the fact is that the GNOME Panel experience with applets
deserves to be torpedoed and replaced with a better system (although I
don't think Shell's Javascript is it).

Personally, since Shell intentionally aims for a "document-centered
UI", I wish they had purposefully created their own global menu
implementation (maybe based on the GTK-OS X API mentioned, for
consistency) and supported it intimately from the start.

Since the GNOME 3.0 platform is approaching, it would be an excellent
time to actually introduce new GTK UI API, rather than just letting
the toolkit stay stagnant while the main shell changes.