Re: App menu Help/About consistency

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 14:36 +0000, Allan Day wrote:
> > In general I would say that they indicate that those items shouldn't
> > be in the app menu, since they "are specific to a particular window or
> > view", but I'd be interested to hear how other people would interpret
> > this based on the draft guidelines, and whether they consider them to
> > be useful enough.
>
> "Actions that are specific to a particular window or view, or which act
> on content within an application window, should not be included."
>
> The middle clause is somewhat stronger than previous guidelines, and I
> think it makes a difference. I interpret that to mean that even if your
> app is single-instance, you're unambiguously not supposed to put
> anything that affects the window in the app menu. That's a big step
> towards making app menus more consistent and minimalist, removing the
> present conceptual divide between app menus for single-instance and
> multi-window apps.
>
> This means Documents, Rhythmbox, and Calculator need to find a new home
> for their View settings, for example. It also means we need to be more
> aggressive in removing actions that affect the window: for instance,
> many games place Undo in the app menu, and Epiphany puts Reopen Closed
> Tab there, both of which would need to be moved.
...

The key word in the sentence you quoted was supposed to be
"particular" - it's supposed to mean that options that affect only one
window or view should be excluded. My interpretation would be that the
Calculator mode is appropriate in the app menu - since it affects all
windows, is a global option for the app, and is likely to be used
infrequently. On the other hand, I would say that the view options for
Documents are inappropriate since they are specific to the overview
part of the application - if you are looking at a particular document
and switch from grid to list, there will be no feedback on screen that
the change had an effect.

I guess I have some work to do to make sure that this is clear. Thanks
for your help with this; it's really useful.

Allan