gnome-panel menus

[Mildred <ml mildred593 online fr>]

Hi,

I would just like to tell GNOME developers about something I find
annoing in this wonderful desktop, and I think it should be addressed.

In my top panel I have the following plugins:
- the menubar
- a frequency scaling plugin
- a monitor (CPU and memory usage)
- a systray with
	- network manager icon
	- power manager icon
	- various other non-GNOME programs
- a sound volume control
- the clock
- a icon showing the current program in use

Now, some of those behave as if they are menus, and some others
strangely.

Some seems to be exactly menu items:

- GNOME menu
- sound volume control
- clock (well, it's a button but otherwise it's very similar)
- current application icon

But the problem I find using all of these, it do not exactly behave
like a menubar. Usually in a menubar, once you opened a menu, you can
show the next menu just by highlighting the next menu (without the need
of a click). But here, If I clicked on the sound volume control icon,
and I want to scitch to the current application icon, I have to click
once to hide the first menu, and a second time to show the menu I want.

So I would like to know if you can manage to make it work better
between applets. I know that may not be easy but I think that would be
a great enhancement to the panel coherency.

Now, some of the icons do not seems to be like menu items, but can show
menus. Some of them have two different menus depending on which button
you click:

- frequency scaling (two menus)
- system monitor (left: opens the system monitor, right: menu)
- network manager icon (two menus)
- power manager icon (two menus)

Well, here I believe that having a standard on which button opens the
menu, it would be easier to use those plugins. I can understand that
some of the plugins do not want a menu on left click, but I suggest
that all plugins that have both a left-click menu and a right-click one
merge the two menus

Maybe the "help" or "about" menu entries have nothing to do with the
left click, I think the best way here would be to provide these
commands in a separate window. For example, the help or about commands
of the power manager icon could be put in the power management
preferences.

The same thing for the network manager plugin. But it would need to
create a such window (that could also list all networks you have the
key, and a button to delete the remembered key, the same for VPN
accesses).

Well, these are my tauchts of the moment. maybe I should create a
bugreport on the bugzilla.

Do you think it's possible to do this, easy ? Do you like those ideas ?

Thanks

Mildred
-- 
Mildred Ki'lya
E-Mail:	mildred593(at)online.fr

Site:	<http://mildred632.free.fr/>
XMPP:	<mildred jabber fr> (GoogleTalk, Jabber)

GPG:	197C A7E6 645B 4299 6D37 684B 6F9D A8D6 [9A7D 2E2B]