Re: Changing of GNOME's Menu Structure

[Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym canada com>]

>>>>> "J" == James M Cape <jcape@jcinteractive.com> writes:

    J> Our preliminary redesign calls for the following toplevel menus
    J> to replace the existing setup:

    J> Development Entertainment Multimedia Network Productivity Text
    J> Editors Utilities

It would seem to me to be most reasonble to map the top level options
to the top activity domains, and to give this human names rather
than engineering terms (unless we are targeting software engineers)

"Development" is very fuzzy.  "Programming" is what we mean, so why
not say so?

What is the difference between "Multimedia" and "Entertainment"?  

"Productivity" is _supposed_ to be what we do with computers in general,
at least when we are not playing with it ;)  I believe you probably
mean appointments, schedules and notebooks.

"Text Editors" seems odd: Most people use just one or two editors and
in their day to day do not need a choice.  The choice depends entirely
on their activity domain.  For programming, you use one editor, for
sysadmin, another, and for office work a third.  These belong in their
activity domains.

"Utilities" is like "Development" and probably means "Misc".

This may be just me, but my use of a computer is delimited by my
activities, and these activities break down into a high-level structure
of the following activity domains, and within these, there are as many
links to data or directories as there are to executables.

"Internet" (web, email, news, IRC, ICQ ...)
"Media" (overlaps internet, RealPlayer, MP3, CDplayer, maybe news URLs)
"Programming" (IDEs, programming editor, file manager on dev directories"
"Office" (WP, spreadsheet, accounting, timetracking, schedule, post-its)
"SysAdmin" (sysadmin editor, file manager on sys directories, linuxconf)
"Config" (a subtopic of sysadmin, but for the user space than root)
"Fun" (games, fun gadgets, puzzles and diversions)

Just a thought.

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@linux.ca>: office voice/fax: 01 519 4222723
TCI - Business Innovations through Open Source : http://www.teledyn.com
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