GWP and 'the foot'

["J. Patrick Narkinsky" <patrick narkinsky ml org>]

I just had the opportunity to check out the latest sources for GWP from
CVS -- first off, for those of you who haven't taken a look lately, do so.
These guys have been coding like crazy.

One thing that they did which I REALLY like is they put a Macintosh-like
'gnome foot' icon on the left-most side of their menubar with some common
utility functions under it.  

For example, this menu in GWP has:
	About...
	Preferences...
	----
	Quit

I REALLY like this as an UI idea.  First, it clears up a lot of the
ambiguity about what to do with the "File" menu in applications where it
is not appropriate (e.g. games).  Secondly, I think that, in this
approach, the distinction between documents and applications is cleared.
What would happen under the file menu would save the FILE, Close under the
File menu would close the file.  Close (or more likely exit) under the
'foot menu' would exit the app.  

I would like to just throw out the idea that we try to make this a
standard.  IMHO, it would be the kind of nifty GUI feature that attracts
people to an environment.

Patrick

--
J. Patrick Narkinsky
patrick@narkinsky.ml.org

"It is so stupid of modern society to have given up believing in the
devil when he is the only explanation for it."  -- Ronald Knox