[Usability] An idea (menus and launchers)

[Carlos Moreno <moreno_pg mochima com>]

I recently came up with an idea of what could be a nice/useful detail
for a  desktop, so I thought I'd throw the idea here  (not sure if the
idea is original/unexplored, or even if it has been already done).

Anyway, it's related to the Recent Documents, or rather, the Recently
Used Files in the applications.  The idea is quite simple;  instead of (or
in addition to) having just one Recent Documents in the "Places" menu,
each particular menu item for an application could/should have a sub-
menu with the recent documents.  Also, and I think this is the nicer
part of my idea, *the launchers* should have a sub-menu as soon as
there are documents recently used for the corresponding application.

If the user clicks on the launcher itself, then the application opens as
usual (e.g., with a blank document);  if the user clicks on the little
arrow next to the launcher (the "drop-down" arrow), then the Recent
Documents list opens underneath the icon.

I put two silly images to illustrate the idea.  This is what the Panel,
with an OpenOffice Writer launcher, would look like when I have
not opened any Writer documents:

http://www.mochima.com/tmp/gnome-launcher_no_recent_docs.png

Then, as the user opens/saves Writer documents, the launcher would
now look like this:

http://www.mochima.com/tmp/gnome-launcher_with_recent_docs.png

(notice that this one is what it looks like *when the user clicks on the
little arrow* at the right bottom corner of the launcher icon).

The launcher could have an effect like the toolbar buttons (what I'm
describing here is typically done with toolbar icons --- for instance,
the "New Document" icon in OpenOffice has a drop-down selection
of Writer / Calc / Presentation / etc.), where the button gets a "double
outline" to make it obvious that we want the drop-down list.

Of course, for the menus I didn't create an image --- it is quite obvious
for the menus --- the menu item corresponding to the application gets
a sub-menu with its related recent documents;  and it is obvious for
the user what it means and what to do about it.

Does it sound like an interesting and implementable idea?

Carlos
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