Re: [Usability] Question: design choice of menubars

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Sat, 2004-09-18 at 00:11 +0000, Frans Englich wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I have a question regarding GNOME's design:
> 
> To my subjective observation, GNOME emphasizes the window paradigm. Mac OS's 
> central menubar mechanism follows up that approach even further, and in 
> addition have numerous advantages. While I have no intents of discussion the 
> pros and cons of having a central menu bar, I wonder: Why have it been chosen 
> to not use a central menubar in GNOME?
> 
> I can think of reasons of various kinds, but I think it would be more 
> appropriate with a neutral answer. Judging from a (quick) glance of the 
> archives it have been discussed before, but no definite declarations or 
> arguments, at least from what I can tell. Perhaps someone have an archive 
> link, or there is any document outlining it?

One big reason is purely technical.  Getting a central menu bar working
properly would take a lot of work in both the underlying toolkits and in
the individual applications.  Recent enhancements to GTK+ make this a
lot easier, I think.

To really come to a consensus on whether a central menu bar is a good
idea, it would be useful to actually get GTK+ and/or a few major
applications patched to use such a feature and experiment with its pros
and cons.

While some of us may have access to OS X, a lot of developers don't, and
a non-hands-on study isn't very conducive to making informed evaluations
and decisions.

> 
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> 			Frans
> 
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