Re: Opening the 3.12 cycle

[Julien Blanc <whity tgcm eu>]

Le 2013-09-23 14:33, Matthias Clasen a écrit :
> Hi,
>
> But maybe there are other things that people are working on, or want
> to work on for 3.12 ? Now is the time to make your ideas known, and
> turn them into concrete plans.

Hi,

I know this has been already discussed a lot, but application menu is 
currently broken.

There are some well-known issues, such as :
- multi-screen (application menu is really single screen oriented)
- focus follows mouse unfriendlyness

But the main concern imho is that the behaviour is completely 
inconsistent between applications.

Let’s say we have 4 types of application :
1) single window, single instance application (example : shotwell). 
These ones fits well with the application menu
2) multiple windows, single instance applications (example : 
epiphany/web). These ones also fits well with the application menu 
model, but there are inconsistencies between applications.
3) single window, multiple instance applications (example : 
gnome-calculator). These ones are a mess.
4) multiple windows, multiple instance applications (example : 
inkscape). These ones are also a mess.

Testing with gnome-3.8 on a debian sid/experimental (maybe some issues 
have already been fixed in 3.10, but in this case i missed them), we 
have the following behaviours :

gnome-terminal (2):
- opening multiple windows : using quit on application menu only closes 
active window

gnome-web, nautilus (2):
- opening multiple windows : using quit on application menu closes all 
windows

gimp (2) :
- application menu is not available when focus is on a tool window
- "Application Menu"->"Quit" doesn’t quit. It does a « close all », 
which closes all images but doesn’t quit gimp.

evince (2) :
- no quit button in application menu

gnome-calculator (3) :
- Mode only affects current window (note : this is agains design 
guidelines. Maybe it should be fixed at the gnome-calculator level).
- switching mode, then switching window makes application menu 
inconsistent with current application state
- quit only quits current window

inkscape (4) :
- using "File"->"Quit" quits only current process
- using "Application Menu"->"Quit" quits all processes.


I’m wondering how anyone can explain such behaviour differences to a 
user, during a training for example.

IMHO, gnome-web / nautilus behaviour should be the standard. Multiple 
instance application should be made single-instance, multiple window 
(note that i am talking about instances, not processes. empathy is an 
example of single-instance, multi-process application), and should 
follow the same scheme as nautilus.

So, here are the goals i would like to be added (by order of 
importance) :

1) complete the following page : 
https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/HIG/ApplicationMenus , with a description 
of the standard application menu item, the required ones (« quit » 
should be mandatory imho), and the expected behaviour for the 
applications, whether they are single or multi-process, single or 
multi-window.

2) Fix gnome applications that are not following the guidelines on 
application menu behaviour.

3) make applicaction menu multi-screen friendly. The MacOSX way 
(duplication of the menu bar on each screen) is ugly, but at least it’s 
more user friendly than nothing. Having the application menu on a 
different screen than the application window is definitely not a good 
idea.

4) make focus-follows-mouse and application menu work well together 
(this one is less important, since it only concerns a minority of 
users).

Regards,

Julien