Re: [Usability] Question: design choice of menubars

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Sat, 2004-09-18 at 01:13, Sean Middleditch wrote:

> 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.

Another couple of reasons:

- Many GNOME users still like focus-follows-mouse mode.  It's hard to
implement a single menu bar in this mode because the mouse is likely to
cross other windows on the way to the menubar, activating their menus
instead.  Thus you have to figure out some sort of timeout mechanism or
something to avoid accidental activations, which is never likely to
satisfy everyone.

- Being a *nix beast, GNOME is more likely to be run on technical
workstations with a much larger physical screen than most Mac users will
ever need.  On such a screen it's physically a lot more demanding to
move the mouse to the top of the screen every time you want to access a
menu than it is on your average iBook.

Of course, these issues assume that GNOME's solution would be the same
as the Mac's, with a menubar at the top of the screen... if we were to
do something more radical and have the application menu activated by
(say) holding the right mouse button, like the Amiga did, you could put
the menubar itself right under the mouse pointer, perhaps using a pie
menu instead of a bar.  But then you lose the ability to have context
sensitive menus as well, unless you resort to modifiers or a third mouse
button.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems