Re: [Usability]Keeping the Quit menu item

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 07:00:10PM -0700, Joshua Adam Ginsberg wrote: 
> We may not be able to define application, but we certainly have some
> good examples of them... Look in the GNOME menu under "Applications"...
> each of these is in fact an application... AbiWord, Evolution, Galeon,
> Mozilla, OO.o, all of them... And selecting them out of the GNOME menu
> (the "start" menu in windows-ese) _starts_ the application...

For most of them it doesn't though, it simply opens a new blank
document. Perhaps this means we should rethink the Applications menu,
I don't know.

The question is: if I "start" a word processor, where is the
"application" so I can click on it and manipulate it in any way? There
isn't an application as on the mac. There's just a window for each
document and that's it.

Say I click a word processor once from the Applications menu. Now I
have one empty document window. Say I click word processor again in
the Applications menu. Now I have two empty document windows. Now I've
"started the application" twice. So then I go and "Quit" the
application, and they both close. Does that make any sense?

If we were really application-based as on the mac, when I clicked the
word processor menu item the second time, it would simply focus the
existing application, not open a new window. But GNOME doesn't even
*support* "focusing an application."

So while our menu may be labeled Applications, for most apps it isn't
an application starter, it's a blank document factory.

So our conceptual model here is screwed, as Ettore says.  We should
step back from the Quit menu issue and sort this out.

> Give users a little more credit...

It's not about credit.  It's geek think when we assume someone would
be proud of knowing those things, or feel they should know them, or
want 'credit' for knowing them. Nobody cares but us geeks.

Do I think people can figure out what a process is if they try?
Sure. Do I think they have any reason to need to? No. The latter
rhetorical question is the proper one.

Havoc