Re: [Usability] Global Menu Bars

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

On Mon, 2005-04-18 at 22:43 +0200, Thom Holwerda wrote:
> I agree. We have discussed this issue quite extensively, and I think 
> that the pro's and con's balance the scale. However, looking at the 
> current state of Gnome, I personally think that a global menu-bar a la 
> OSX suits it very, very well.
> 
> Looking into the possibility of making a nice applet for it so people 
> can test it, that would be awesome and a very wise thing to do. That 
> way users and developers can "try it on for size", and we can base our 
> comments on actual experience and usage instead of articles and 
> studies. If I could code, I'd already be on it.

Before anything can be coded, we need a specification. At least a draft
and a good plan. I don't think it makes much sense to implement a global
menubar like KDE does right now (where the menubar is still managed by
the application), because that's very inflexible and makes it impossible
for third party apps to integrate.

A menubar spec should probably be similar to the current notification
spec. Applications need to be able to define the menuitems (including
check items, radio items, separators, etc) and receive the proper
signals.

I'm wondering, how can we properly handle the case of child windows
(not) having their own menu? We could override the global menubar in
case it has one and keep showing the parent window's menubar in case it
doesn't, but how does the user then know if the current menu applies to
the main window or the child window? Certainly an important question in
cases like File -> Close. How does OS X handle this case, I assume it
just doesn't have menus that are specific to child windows?
-- 
Daniel Borgmann <daniel borgmann gmail com>