Re: GNOME 2.0 Menu design

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> A small note about versions, people have problems to discover the
> version. So putting it in the launch place could help. That or make
> the About window be useful always, so users discover it will be always
> interesting, not a list of authors (from user POV: do I care who did
> it?).

It would also be useful for users to have documentation. So why don't we
include a full page of documentation for the program in the tooltip? Oh,
and perhaps users will not know how to minimize the program, so we can
contain a notice about that in the title. Yes, I'm being silly.

That users have a hard time figuring out the version number may be a
problem (I think about box is fine, but whatever), but why is this a
problem that should be solved at the launcher? Why does it help the user
to know what version of a program is installed in the menu itself? I can
think of some minor usefulness (on a new computer I might notice that
the Mozilla was M19 and choose to run NS4.x instead), but none
sufficient to really justify the extra text.

> > "Create and edit images" -> "Retouch photographs or create new images"
> 
> Eeer, only photographs? Then 3D images are photographs? Or another app
> is needed to change them? ;] I think the original phrase is not so
> bad, maybe change "edit" to "retouch" or "modify", just that.

GIMP is, for all intents and purposes an attempt to recreate the
facilities of Adobe Photoshop. A lot of the functionality in Photoshop,
and hence in GIMP is geared towards the editing of photos. So we talk
about both GIMPs ability to create images (or edit them, I think that is
implicitly included) and its usefulness to retouch photographs. There
are many image editors that are *not* geared towards retouching
photographs, so this is a useful distinction. But I don't really care
much about this.
 
> > > Font Selector(not sure of the usefulness of this one - removed from
> > > GNOME 2.0? - alternatively it could go under developer tools?) 
> > Lets kill it.
> 
> Just a doubt: suppose a font for an app is needed, and that app is not
> a GNOME one, use the xfontsel then? No, thanks. I do not think every
> app in Unix will end with a GNOME version. Also it could do a nice job
> like calendar: just provide font descriptions, for whatever the user
> wants, no just integrated as the coder though.
> 
> The colour selector, the character picker and others also fit into
> this multipurpose category: be able to do something, and discover new
> usages too. There are methods for all them (change colours, change
> fonts, insert non typical characters) but the app must have them
> first, while having a common tool and DnD or c&p could also work.

Yes. If its not a GNOME app its reasonable that you may have to use
non-GNOME applications to use it simply. I have never used either the
font selector or the colour selector in my life and have gotten by just
fine using a GNOME environment. These are abstruse features, but perhaps
enough people will want them that they can be included in a seperate
"non-gnome-support" package.

-Seth