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

[Pat Costello <Patrick Costello Sun COM>]

Cracking good suggestions from Roberto. The Actions Menu disappears, which is a 
good thing, and the Main Menu gets a real role, rather than just being a 
repository for every other menu in the desktop. The other menus are distributed 
between suitable categories. Very sensible proposal. 

Pat

Roberto proposed
> 
> "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)
> 
> 
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