Re: [Usability] Question: design choice of menubars

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Mon, 2004-09-20 at 12:35 +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> 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.

If the system is designed the way I imagine it would, the single menubar
wouldn't be _forced_ on the user, just optional.  I.e., when you add the
"System Menu Bar" applet to your panel, all your apps start using the
menu bar.  Maybe add a GConf key to turn it off, or just differentiate
between the two applets.

> 
> - 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

I just have to ask - have you _seen_ the monitors Apple sells?  ;-)

> move the mouse to the top of the screen every time you want to access a
> menu than it is on your average iBook.

One of the advantages of the menu bar always being at the top of the
screen is the increased ease in targeting it - toss your mouse towards
the top of the screen, there you are.

> 
> 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.

Given that context menus generally aren't supposed to show you anything
that you can't already get done using other buttons or the menu bar
itself, that wouldn't be too huge of a problem, would it?  It would just
get rid of having two separate menu for doing largely the same thing.

> 
> Cheeri,
> Calum.
> 
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.