Re: Idea For Pinnable menus

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le samedi 12 mai 2012 à 08:23 -0400, Anthony Gasparetto a écrit :
> I used to use a program called GeoWorks. One of the best features it had 
> were the pinnable menus. The menus contained a spot that stopped the 
> menus from collapsing when an item is selected. I proposed this idea at 
> the Ubuntu unity web site but they didn't think it would be appropriate 
> with the unity shell. They liked the idea and suggested I post it on the 
> Gnome webpage. Here is a link.
> http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/29568/
GTK had this feature for a long time, but it was removed in the move to
version 3 as it does not seem to be widely used by applications/people.
GIMP is the only example I have of an app that enabled it.

The rationale is that « pinnable » menus are mostly a workaround for
badly designed GUIs. If an action is very useful, it should be present
in a (possibly contextual) toolbar, not in a hidden pinnable menu. In
the example linked on your Ubuntu Brainstorm idea, the menu to move an
object does not make much sense since you have the arrows keys for that.

One case where pinnable menus can be useful is for complex (e.g.
scientific) apps, where you may want to pin the menus related to the
action you are currently performing. But even in that case, different
toolbars for different modes can be better.

My two cents