[Usability] Sub-category based grouping of icons in GNOME menus

[Peter Clifton <pcjc2 cam ac uk>]

Hi guys,

I'm new to this list, but I think this is probably the right place..

I'm a developer for the gEDA project, we write cross platform electronic
CAD tools. The tools are GTK based, and as a personal preference, I run
the GNOME desktop (because it's awesome ;)).

With the last stable release cycle of our tools, we added menu and mime
icons, although the lack of a suitable "Electronics" menu category was
somewhat of a sticking point. We chose to plough ahead with a non
XDG-spec compliant main category, and I wrote a small package which
provides that menu, (and is now packaged as a dependency of our apps in
a number of the major distributions).

On specialised distributions, e.g. Fedora Electronics Lab, the
Electronics menu actually gets rather full - there are tools for
schematic editing, PCB layout, chip design layout, and it is difficult
for the user to identify at a glance which are which in a large menu.

Chitlesh Goorah (creator and maintainer of Fedora Electronics Lab),
proposed that we should make the menu a tree, with sub-categories under
Electronics. I didn't like that idea, instead subscribing to the
"Shallow is good" view of the menu system.

What I proposed to him instead, was that the menu ought to demark
between sub-categories, something like this (just a mock-up):

http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/geda/menus.png


I started looking for somewhere to take this idea to the GNOME
developers, and came across:

http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/Menus

It seems that the "Preferences" menu is another place where the menu
become cluttered and difficult to navigate, partly due to a mass of
capplets, and just partly because preferences covers such a wide area.

I made a new mockup and put it on the above whiteboard page.

I suppose I'd envisage this keying off the sub-categories listed in
the .desktop file, although we may have to be more specific, and add the
category text to be displayed in a similar manner to how the menus are
defined currently. Another way to think of it would be an in-lined
sub-menu.


Comments and feedback on this idea would be warmly received,

Best regards,

-- 
Peter Clifton

Electrical Engineering Division,
Engineering Department,
University of Cambridge,
9, JJ Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge
CB3 0FA

Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!)