[Usability] Mac-style menus?

[David Feldman <mailing-lists interfacethis com>]

Has anyone attempted to implement Mac-style menus - that is, a global 
menu bar (in a panel) that contains the menus for the frontmost app or 
window?

There are several usability advantages (some well-described in an 
asktog.com article I can't seem to find):

- Fitts' Law states that the time to acquire a target is a function of 
the distance to it and its size. By putting menus along one edge of the 
screen we effectively increase their size in one dimension to infinity. 
In more mundane terms, we eliminate a lot of mousing around necessary 
when someone overshoots the menus - only the direction to them has to 
be right, not the distance.

- Once one is accustomed to the Mac menu bar, it provides some nice 
context for the current app regardless of what windows are open. In the 
case of something like Firefox this doesn't matter all that much. But 
for a multi-window app like the GIMP it could be nice: Users won't have 
to guess which window's menus to go to, or which window to close to 
close the app (in essence, which is the "master" window). The master 
window's menus would be in the panel, including a global Quit function.

I imagine this couldn't be done perfectly, but that a window manager 
could pull the menus out of their windows and dump them in a panel. Has 
anyone tried this?

--Dave