Re: [Usability] Detailed menus

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 08:19, Vidar Braut Haarr wrote:
> Iain * wrote:
> > I took another deep breath and dived back into the infamous
> > gnome-panel/menu.c and came up with this
> > http://marlin.sf.net/detailed-menu.png
> 
> That looks really nice! :) However, I don't think it's a very good idea. 
> When you've got a fresh GNOME install, the only things you should really 
> see in the menu are the Generic Names, and they should be descriptive 
> enough not to require a description. And if you then install a secondary 
> application for the same purpose, you are sure to know about it, and so 
> you already know how to distinguish between them.

I just want to clear things up here.  Every time the menu and generic
names and such come up in conversation, people talk about this "fresh
GNOME install" that only has the base set of GNOME applications.  And
that sounds really nice.  It's just that I've never seen this fresh
GNOME install anywhere, ever.  Every fresh install of a distro I've
looked at has some GNOME stuff and some KDE stuff and maybe an extra
browser and email client.

Real users don't install GNOME.  They're lucky if they install their
distro to begin with.  In the real world, GNOME is used in heterogeneous
multi-user environments.  We should make our design decisions for the
real world, not for this hypothetical "fresh GNOME install".

--
Shaun