Re: Freature suggestion for gnome 2.0

[Gordon Messmer <yinyang eburg com>]

On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero wrote:

> Maybe. The idea of ordering menus by task was great, and should never
> change

I agree, the grouping of menus should not change.  My point is simply that
there is no reason for me to care about the name of every program I
run.  I think it would be more useful for the menu items to describe the
function of the application they will launch than the name of the
application.

The reason I use CLI primarily is exactly this.  If I have to know the
name of the program I want to use anyway, I might as well type it
out.  Then I don't have to bother with the mouse.

Listing the available programs should be expressive and helpful to
users.  Listing applications by name usually isn't.  Being inconsistant
(some names, some descriptions) isn't helpful either.  Isn't there a
gnome UI group that should be taking care of this type of thing? 

BTW, KDE suffers this ambiguity, too.  It used to be a lot worse, but if
you look through a KDE menu, you'll come across plenty of stuff your mom
wouldn't understand.  There's plenty of stuff I don't understand without
opening it up.  Consider: Utilities->Kfloppy, Utilities->KJots,
Internet->LICQ, Internet->KPPP give very little information about their
functions.

Windows is even worse.  Rather than organizing the menu entries by
function, they're listed by Distributor/application name.  There, not only
do you have to know what program to use, but who provided it.  This
naturally leads application designers to put icons in the shortcut bar or
the desktop, rendering those two as useless as the menu.

The GNOME community does not have to conform to those poor standards  :)

MSG