Re: #4 on ToDo list: make the top panel prettier

["Jonas Jørgensen" <jj qio dk>]

2009/1/19 Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>:
> On Sun, 2009-01-18 at 19:14 -0800, Brian Fleeger wrote:
>> I have one question: with the part of the top panel next to the
>> activities button empty, are there any plans to use global menus to
>> more effectively use that wide open space?  Is it going to go fallow?
[...]
> I have some opinion that the global menu bar is pretty tied to
> the application-centric model of the Macintosh .. it's not entirely
> clear to me that you can go to the global menu bar without adopting that
> model wholesale. Which would be a pretty major change to the way the
> desktop works.

I'm curious as to why you have that opinion, and I'd love to hear an
explanation of it -- because I strongly prefer the
menu-bar-in-top-panel approach, and I strongly dislike the
application-centricism of Mac OS :-)

Apart from the obvious space-saving and easier-to-hit-ness, a top menu
bar makes it far easier for users to grasp the concept of what it's
for, in my experience. There's one place where there is a menu, where
you can do things related to what you're currently doing (what window
is active), instead of cluttering up the window with menu+toolbar
making it hard to make sense of what is what. It's really a much more
GNOME-like approach IMO. The current menu-inside-window approach is
really not all that intuitive or usable, I've come to realize, as I've
dragged myself further and further out of my little geek worldview and
started to observe and understand most people's interactions with
computer interfaces.

[ taking the liberty of cc'ing mpt, who I'm sure has something
incredibly insightful to add to this discussion - as always :-) ]

- Jonas