Re: Applications Unnecessary?

[Greg K Nicholson <greg gkn me uk>]

> That is me fast reading again. But how is this different form a menubar with
> images?

If we're talking about having a menu bar with images, plus a separate
toolbar: this is different because all of the controls are part of one
UI element.

If you mean how is this different from *just* a pretty menu bar and no
toolbar: the key difference is that important controls have top-level
buttons (not in a menu) so they can still be activated with one click.
For example, in a web browser, the Back button wouldn't be in a
menu—it'd be its own button (and still at the very start of the
toolbar to benefit from Fitts's Law).

And having commands in *logical* groups would make a massive difference, IMO.

> I think that text-only is better in this case. Iamages are not good
> becaue the rules about making programs should be very tight to enfore every
> app to have exactly the same images for Certain types of operations. What
> about programs with a lot of custom menus?

Showing images or not isn't really important. I thought they'd make
the menus more inviting to new users and those with a pictorial mind,
and be more distinct from each other than lumps of text would. But: we
already offer the option to show text, images or both for toolbar
buttons; so in the end this would be distro or user choice.

Choosing the appearance of each image would still be down to the
desktop environment (like toolbar buttons now), so they'd still
respond to the user's theme. The Tango project already has a standard
for naming icons and we should continue to use that.

The situation for apps with unusual menus would be the same as it is
now for any app with unusual icons. Ideally they should co-ordinate
with Tango to ensure consistency. But if they're going to ship their
own icons, we have no choice but to trust the app designers to make
the icons fit in.

> I would rather like to see a toolbox on top of each program that is context
> sensitive to the contents in the window so if you have a image in it (edit
> mode) a tools form gimp would appear and if you have text a text formatting
> tools would appear (no save and such as this is done automatically and
> tranparently). and if you have audio -audio tools and so on. I was influence
> by this idea on Gnome Live :

I think conceptually this is the same as showing *all* possible
commands on the toolbar with the irrelevant ones greyed out. I don't
think either approach is bad.

Just greying out irrelevant commands keeps the app's appearance
consistent; but completely hiding irrelevant commands makes the app
less visually cluttered. I prefer the greying out approach, but either
is fine.