Re: Location of Desktop Preferences menu (was Reducing the number of special uris in gnome)

[Daniel McKee <daniel netcom mine nu>]

On Tue, 2002-07-02 at 15:49, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> "James M. Cape" <jcape ignore-your tv> writes: 
> > I think "Desktop" is better than "Actions", but "GNOME" is better still.
> > For most users, and in other places in the UI, "Desktop" refers to the
> > desktop/root window: in the default case, nautilus icons. It also
> > promotes a cleaner ideological separation between GNOME & the
> > applications which use/require GNOME. GNOME2 vs. GNOME2 applications,
> > etc.
> > 
> 
> We've been doing our very best to bury references to "GNOME", compare
> 1.x to 2.0 in this respect. With I think good reason.  You can't
> really explain to a user what "GNOME" is, and they are plenty confused
> about it. I've had to explain it to journalists who've _used_
> GNOME/KDE quite a bit, and still don't really get it.  GNOME is mostly
> defined by things a certain developer community happens to work on,
> not by any real user-interesting line.

But something to keep in mind, is, do we want Gnome/Linux/X to become
like a Mac? Too worried about "ignorant" people using the PC that most
of the features that the average user will want, get's buried or taken
out, because it might confuse grandma or someone like that.  The average
user running Linux right now, isn't that ignorant Windows/Mac user or
Grandma next door.

> 
> So e.g. we've been doing s/GNOME Control Center/Preferences/, 
> s/GNOME Calculator/Calculator/
> 
> Imagine this:
> 
>  Microsoft Calculator 
>  Microsoft Control Center
>  Microsoft Text Editor
> 
> it's just noise... it's a _calculator_, who cares what project shipped
> it...
> 
> The right place to say "GNOME" is in about dialogs and such.
> 
> The relevant end user concept is "the computer" or _possibly_ "the
> operating system"; just as they don't care that the WM is a separate
> process, they don't care that some essentially random (to them) subset
> of controls on their screen came from the GNOME project.

Again, what end user are we talking about here? One like you and I and
most everyone in this mailing list or the old lady next door or the
first time computer user?

> 
> Actions isn't great but it works fine. Applications aren't really
> actions, so in its context Actions does distinguish the things in that
> menu from the things in the only other menu on the bar. You don't need
> to understand any diffuse implementation concepts like "GNOME" and
> "desktop" to figure out what Actions might mean.

I agree to a point.  My whole thing is, I want to see Gnome 2.0 be
better than Winbloze XP and MacOS X, etc.  So, I think we should at
least discuss alternatives, no matter how lame etc...On the road to 2.2,
2.4, etc...

> 
> If the problem is that Preferences aren't Applications, why not just 
> add another menu:
> 
>    Applications   Preferences   Actions
> 
> Or create a "preferences application" ("nautilus preferences:///") and
> just have a single menu item for that under applications, instead of
> the prefs menu. Or it's possible that what we have now is good enough.
> I'm not sure people are going to be pedantic about how the prefs
> dialogs aren't technically applications.
> 
> Havoc
> 

I'm not trying to come off sarcastic so, please dont take it that way.
IMHO, we should rethink the menu scheme...

--Daniel McKee