Re: [Usability] New way of accessing software (WAS: Re: Big Panel menus (32x32))

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

> From: Calum Benson <calum benson sun com> 
>
> On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 11:10, Janne wrote: 
>
> > One way might be to mirror the "recent files" mechanism: have an area at
> > the bottom of the main menu with room for, say four to six apps, and set
> > the most recently used apps there - without altering the menu content
> > itself. That way the menu structure itself remains static and
> > predictable. 
>
> There was some discussion about doing this here:
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2002-September/msg00053.html
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93350 
>
> I agree (as I said then) that it would probably have to go at the top
> level of the main menu.  I don't think putting it in a submenu like we
> do with "Recent Documents" would give noticeably quicker access than if
> the app you wanted to run wasn't on the list.

Somewhat off topic (but this is the usability list so I don't care:) 
Wouldn't be cool if recent documents (and even appplications maybe) was an 
autogenerated list based on a filesystem metadata search of the 10 most 
recently used files by a user. (/me has been dreaming of reiserfs's 
potential here). 

> > And since we aren't touching them, it's fine to experiment
> > with statistics to show the most recently - and heavily - used apps, so
> > a one-off usage of some app won't push away an app that is being used
> > all the time.
>
> XP also lets you 'pin' particular apps to this list, so they never get
> pushed off.  It's kind of a hidden feature the way they do it, though. 

Even more off topic. I personally feel the big problem with the menus is 
that they are application/program based which I consider to be an 
implementation detail. It would probably make a lot more sense to make them 
task based. In this scenario apps like eog, pdf (viewer apps) would never be 
in the menus. Instead you would just open files using *gasp* the file 
manager as most users probably already do anyway. To create New documents 
(what most users use the applications menu for anyway) we could add a 
toplevel "New" menu with subitems such as "Document," "Image," 
"Spreadsheet," "Text File." This would allows us to remove a substantial 
number of apps from the apps menu, probably to the point to where we could 
label it tools (I'm thinking of apps that don't handled documents here). 

THis is a pretty vague idea, but I just thought I'd throw in some ideas. 

dave