[Usability]Menus and Menu items

[Mark Nelson <nels1678 tc umn edu>]

Hi Guys,

Here are a couple of thoughts of mine after looking at some of the
various menus and menu items in gnome and gnome programs.  I can submit
bug reports on these if they are bugs.

- Menu items in applications (Such as File/Edit)and on the Menu panel
(such as Applications/Actions) should highlight in the same way that
toolbar icons do.  If I was a new computer user, I'd have no idea that I
could click on the word "Application" or "File" to access it as a menu. 
Highlighting the word on mouse-over would help give feedback that you
can do something with it.  This would also have the added benefit that
users would know what part of the menu panel or "file bar" they are
currently hovering over.  Menu names (such as File) should continue to
be highlighted while the menu is visible (as is the current behavior).

- In most cases verbs are used in the various menus for doing actions. 
Open, Open Location, Save, Close, etc.  In the File menu (at least for
gedit2), there are two items that are not.  One is the "New" item.  This
should be changed to "Create New...".  The other is the new "Recent
Files" item.  This should be changed to "Open Recent..." or something
similar.  (this appears to be the behavior in file roller, so perhaps
this is only a problem with gedit). 

- In several "viewer" programs such as ggv and eog, there is a File menu
item "New Window".  It appears that the desired behavior for opening a
file (such as a picture in eog) is to use the "New Window" menu item,
and then open a picture in that new window.  Using "open" in a window
with a picture already in it replaces the picture in the current window
with the new one.  This is inconsistent with the way that applications
such as abiword and gnumeric operate.  The "Open" item in these programs
always opens a new file in a new window.  Further, in eog dragging and
dropping a picture into a window that already has an image in it will
open the image in a new window.  This is also inconsistent with the way
"Open" operates.  The proposed fix for this is to change the "Open"
behavior so that any new data is always opened in a new window.  The
"New Window" menu item can then be removed as you would never need to
open a new window with no data in it.

Thanks,
Mark Nelson