Re: Applications Unnecessary?

[Anton Kerezov <ankere gmail com>]

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 8:34 PM, Greg K Nicholson <greg gkn me uk> wrote:

> 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.

This design has not thought of the toolbars but only of the idea to introduce a command line interface but much more intelligent, simle and beautiful than a terminal. Yes there is repeated functionality so I suggest we remove the toolbars because they are rarely used and usually very cluttered (could not represent a specific functianality fast as the CLI). So I just thing that we should do (2). You can read more issues/solutions with this approach in the usability archive for the prev month with title New Menubars topic.

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

That would be good compromise but only a compromise.
 

(2) Add pretty, friendly icons to each menu title (if you can't draw
it, it shouldn't be a menu name)

It is like that now and it loks very busy. Icons should appear only for actions that perform operatins on physical devices.
 

(3) Fold all the menus into the toolbar, as toolbar buttons with
expansion-arrows

Not good IMO.
 

(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

Agree here.
 

Anton