Re: [Usability] Global Menu Bars

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

On Mon, 2005-04-18 at 23:54 +0200, Thom Holwerda wrote:
> >
> > 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?
> >
> 
> Well, I'm currently in a "new mail" window, and the top bar is still 
> the same. Every app simply has it's own top-menu and child windows 
> indeed don't alter it. And dialogs arent of any concern, as dialogs in 
> osx don't even have a window border; they suspend down from their 
> parent's window titlebar.


Great, there we have our first huge problem. ;) Changing all
applications to never use different menus for child windows is certainly
not reasonable. If there is no elegant solution to this, it could well
be a showstopper.
One approach might be to only display the parent window's menu for
dialogs, so the menu would become empty for normal windows that have no
menu.
In any case, this important difference between the OS X and free desktop
environments need to be considered when evaluating the usefulness of it.
Mac practically grew up with this behavior, so everything is optimized
for it.
-- 
Daniel Borgmann <daniel borgmann gmail com>