Re: Applications Unnecessary?

[Greg K Nicholson <greg gkn me uk>]

(I believe I sent this to Anton but not the list. Bad Google Mail!—no
cookies for you.):

> I have also proposed in the usability list an idea baout New Menubars. It
> was discussed a lot and a lot of people have agreed that it should be
> implemented in some form. Even the research I did on Gnome 3.0 proves this
> further. Here's the mockup:
>
> http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/4500/newmenusystem.png

I think this design still fails to either (1) draw a clear distinction
between the menu bar and the toolbar—when should I expect something to
be in the toolbar, and when should I expect to use the menu?—or (2)
combine them.

So there's still duplicated functionality—two different ways to do the
same thing, with no distinct use case for each. As I understand it,
toolbar functionality is currently duplicated in the menus because
toolbars are inaccessible. There are two solutions to this:

(1) Make toolbars accessible and remove duplicate items from the menu.
(2) Get rid of toolbars.

The first option still leaves no clear distinction between menus' and
toolbars' purposes, so I reject it. The second option leaves us with
just menus. Try hiding all the toolbars in all the apps you use
frequently, and using just the menus. It's not fun.

Menus currently suck: everyone avoids thinking about them as much as
possible—experienced users know commands' menu locations from memory
(not logic), or they use keyboard shortcuts. And new users rarely
explore the menus because they're too daunting.

The main problem, though, is that the menu titles are largely
conventional and make absolutely no sense much of the time—for
example, Firefox's File menu. Edit → Copy and Edit → Preferences both
make some sense, but why are they grouped together in one menu? Some
menu titles are misleading; for example, in Pidgin's conversation
window, Conversation → View Log is plain wrong—it's the log of *all*
conversations with the contact, not just this one.

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The simple solution:

(1) Reorganise all the menus so that the menu name actually relates to
each menu item, and all the items in each menu relate to each other
(2) Add pretty, friendly icons to each menu title (if you can't draw
it, it shouldn't be a menu name)
(3) Fold all the menus into the toolbar, as toolbar buttons with
expansion-arrows
(4) Make the labels of the least important items (the ones at the end
of the toolbar) hide if the window isn't wide enough to show them all
(5) Require this in the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines

Tomboy's note-window interface is a near-perfect example of this in
action. (The only nit is that the menu buttons ought to have
down-arrows to make it clear that they're menus). Internet Explorer 7
is another good example (though putting the menu in the tab bar is a
bit odd—we don't need *that* much location bar).

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Case study: Banshee:

* Player menu: Preferences, Close and Quit.
* Library menu: most of the current Media menu, Rescan, Download Cover Art.
* Playlist menu: Write to CD, Rename, Export, Delete, Select All/None.
(disabled when no playlist is either selected or playing)
* Track menu: Add to Playlist, Edit Information, Remove from Library,
Delete from Drive. (disabled when no track is either selected or
playing)
* View menu: unchanged.
* Playback menu: mostly unchanged, minus items already on the toolbar
(including Shuffle); perhaps with the Repeat options shown inline.
* Help menu: unchanged.

If the Now Playing view is displayed, Track and Playlist should refer
to the currently playing track and playlist; otherwise, the selected
one.

Plugins' menu items (currently under Tools) could either retreat into
the Preferences (Last.fm, Mirage), or get their own top-level menu
(Bookmarks).

The duplicate Repeat options should be removed from the bottom-right
of the window.