Re: [Fwd: Re: [gnome-love] start-menu]

[Darryl Rees <rees netnam vn>]

General comments:

(a) You can put separators in menus.
(b) As to structure of menus, that's kind of a distro problem but you 
can customize it
(c) There used to be an option for larger icons, this seems to have 
disappeared at some point (gnome 2.0?)
(d) Some things I think are shitty about XP style menus:
     1) They change depending on your usage patterns. That's a really 
bad idea, the interface becomes less deterministic and it's harder to 
use muscle memory.
     2) They are 2 columns wide: I think it is harder to find stuff 
visually with >1 column, also seems more complicated muscle-wise (not 
quite a Fitt's law thing, but you have to make an initial movement 
horizontally as well as vertically...). Splitting out the applicatons 
menu into several smaller more specific menus on the taskbar might be a 
good idea however.
     3) A lot of the less commonly used stuff is in effect 'more 
hidden' in the new XP style menus. Yesterday, I watched someone pull up 
a spreadsheet to do a simple calculation; when I said 'why don't you use 
the calculator' they looked at me blankly and were amazed when I pulled 
it up.

Pipe-dream stuff for me would be no start-menu at all, but a persistent 
sidebar that's kind of the panel, the start menu, and a nautilus sidebar 
all rolled into one. You could have different tabs like "Recently Used", 
"Document Templates", "Bookmarks", "All Applications", "Setup", etc, 
etc.  Stuff like this have been done before, and something like this is 
in MS Blackcomb I believe.

Cheers,
Darryl.