Re: GNOME Menu (was: Re: [Usability]Re: UI Review Suggestions - Panel)

[Roberto Rosselli Del Turco <rosselli ling unipi it>]

Eugene O'Connor wrote:
> Fair enough, it looks like there is a good case to change the name 
> of the GNOME Menu. Main Menu seems the obvious contender, but I'd like 
> to think about this for a couple of days to see if I can come up with 
> anything better.

"Main menu", or simply "Main", seems only too logical. But I have a 
question: why are the GNOME top level menus limited to 2? and why are 
they so unbalanced? that is, the GNOME Menu holds almost everything, 
while in the Actions menu you can only choose a half dozen items (one of 
them, Screenshot, not really that useful for the average user, as it has 
already been noticed). A standard menu panel looks almost empty, until 
you open the GNOME menu and look at all kind of stuff (preferences, 
applications, utilities, help, home) bunched together.

Food for thought for GNOME 2.4: I think there should be a Main menu, but 
it should be a user-centered menu, allowing him to perform basic 
actions, browse his home dir, change personal information and open 
recent files. The other menus should be spread on the menu panel, so 
that it is easy a) to find what's needed b) to host distributions custom 
tools or items (documentation, for instance). Something like this (hope 
formatting is preserved):

Main
    Home
    Personal info
    	About myself
	Change password
    ------------
    Open Recent
    Run program
    Search for files...
    ------------
    Lock screen
    New login
    Log out

Applications
    Multimedia
    Game
    Office
    Net
    Database
    Development
    ...

Accessories
    Archiving
    File tools
    Monitoring
    Text editors
    Terminals
    ...

Preferences
    Desktop preferences
    GNOME System Tools
    ------------
    Linuxconf
    Webmin
	...

Help
    GNOME help
    Linux guide for beginners
    Howto in english
    ------------
    About GNOME

Note that the GNOME menu being only two levels deep doesn't help much 
because, as noted in a previous thread, some distributions just put it 
"as is" inside their menu structure, making it difficult to find the 
desidered menu item. Result: my menu panel has grown lots of launcher 
icons. It would be more difficult for distros to do this if the menu 
structure were more expanded, on the contrary I believe they'd use it to 
insert their own menu items.

Ciao

--
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco      e-mail:	rosselli cisi unito it
Dipartimento di Scienze			rosselli ling unipi it
del Linguaggio			Then spoke the thunder	DA
Universita' di Torino		Datta: what have we given?  (TSE)

  Hige sceal the heardra,     heorte the cenre,
  mod sceal the mare,       the ure maegen litlath.  (Maldon 312-3)