Re: [Usability] Menu order

[Christian Neumair <chris gnome-de org>]

Am Sonntag, den 08.08.2004, 20:04 +0200 schrieb markus hammer:
> Am Son, den 08.08.2004 um 19:33 Uhr +0200 schrieb Samuel Abels:
> > On Fri, 2004-08-06 at 02:49, Christoffer Olsen wrote:
> > > I usually run my Gnome in English, but today I ran it in Norwegian. All
> > > of a sudden, I noticed that my GNOME menu was reordered - alphabetized,
> > > that is. It is alphabetized in English too, thus Accessories is on top,
> > > and not at the bottom, as it is now. I got confused by this until I
> > > understood what happened, and then I got atuned to it.
> > 
> > Yes, I would love to see a better solution either. I am using a german
> > menu at work and an english language menu at home and this confuses me
> > all the time.
> > 
> > The only alternative solution would be a fixed order (right?), but I
> > would still prefer that. Isn't it better to sort the list by semantics
> > then by syntax anyway?
> 
> i encountered this too. its utterly unlogical, dont know if i ever filed
> a bug report though. a good example - the german gnome menu has desktop
> settings as second entry. 
> it should be consistent across different locales, so i would vote for a
> semantic list as well.

The problem is that having them not sorted alphabetically may confuse
users who don't know that our order was intentional. Maybe we've to
figure out what order fits our needs best. We've got to consider what
applications most people use before deciding how we sort it. Another
solution would be to add a gconf keys containing a list of preferred
application menu entries that (if they exist) should be shown in that
order before the rest is appended afterwards. Of course, the most
intuitive order has to be the default.
Proposed order that springs to mind:

Desktop Preferences
Office
Internet
Multimedia
Graphics
Development
Games
Accessoires
System Tools
Other
[Rest]

I'll look into implementing it for GNOME 2.10 :).

regs,
 Chris