Revisiting App Menu

["Berin Loritsch" <BERIN LORITSCH cpmx saic com>]

I have done some thinking about this idea that was originally posted by someone else (sorry, I forgot your name).  It was shoGFt down because it required a third menu.  It is in regards to a Gnome app menu reminiscent of the Mac menu.  Be also had (probably still has, I haven't seen it since DR8) the Be menu.  The Be menu was the app menu for whatever app was open.  There were no required menus, but if there was a menu bar, that was the only menu required.  Be originally had it located in the dock--which was unintuitive and obnoxious.  They later moved it to the window.

The bottom line is, we want to emulate good GUI, and not bad GUI.  If we had the Gnome app menu (a graphic is intuitive if it is consistent), it would house the Quit, About..., and Configuration items (and possibly anything else that could be considered global).  If that menu item were consistent in every app, with the Quit, About..., and Configuration menu items always in that menu; that would be a learned intuitiveness.  Many of the hangups we have here are with former users of other OS's.  They each have their pluses and minuses, and their own unique way of doing things.  I think that the Gnome menu would be intuitive for new users, and a learned intuitiveness for users that immigrants (not native un*x users).

On other fronts, with our proposed centrally configurable key bindings, we have a leg up on all other known OS's.  However, one thing the Mac has better than anything else right now is its accessibility to unconventional characters.  For instance, if you are writing a spanish document, by pressing Alt-E before any vowel you can obtain an accented vowel.  The same goes for the circumflex above the n.  While I understand that the particular keys used are not all that intuitive, we need easy access to these characters (as well as copyright and trademark characters).  This example assumes that you have an American keyboard--I don't know about any foreign keyboards.

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