Unity-Style Menu

[Matthew Planchard <msplanchard gmail com>]

Hi All,

First, I'd like to say that I really like the Gnome3 shell. It was definitely a surprise at first, but it's gotten to be very intuitive. In fact, I recently installed Ubuntu Natty Narwhal to try out their new Unity interface, and I found it to be slow, clunky, and poorly integrated in comparison to Gnome3. The combination Expose/Dash feature is probably my favorite thing, and I just discovered that you can switch between windows of an open program with Alt+(key above tab), which fixes my long-standing annoyance that I couldn't just switch between menus of an open program.

My time piddling about in Unity, though, has brought an idea to mind, which I wanted to share with you. One of the cooler features they have is the integration of the menu into the top bar. It gives the user more screen space and recognizes that generally, no one needs to see the menus unless they need to. However, they put the menus into the top bar in a fashion whereby when the user hovers over the application title, all menu options appear on the top bar, sometimes replacing other useful information.

My idea is that since Gnome3 already has a clickable application icon on the top bar that opens a menu with a "close" option, why not just go ahead and insert the entire program menu? This would increase visible screen space for the users, while providing an intuitive way to access the program menus. In fact, when I first saw the icon along the top, I thought that is what it would do.

So, it's just an idea, and I cannot imagine that it has not occurred to you previously, but I wanted to put it out there anyway. I think it would be a really fantastic idea.

Thanks again for a fantastic desktop. I look forward to future updates.

Namaste.

Matt

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