Re: [Usability] Question: design choice of menubars

[Frans Englich <frans englich telia com>]

On Saturday 18 September 2004 00:13, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> 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.

Yes, getting KDE/GNOME to support it by themselves is perhaps doable, but 
making sure applications can be run in the respective environment is of a 
quite different magnitude, AFAICT.


Thanks,

		Frans