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

["Natan Yellin" <aantny gmail com>]

On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 9:18 AM, Peter Clifton <pcjc2 cam ac uk> wrote:

On Sat, 2008-12-27 at 09:29 +1930, Dokuro wrote:
> > 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
> >
> > --
> > Peter Clifton
>
> It's a nice idea, but I feel that it increases a lot the amount of
> space needed by the menus, they are already too big for 15" screens
> (mostly on the preferences menu since it has more items) on your
> electronic menu it works fine, i could even see it working nicely on
> the music menu (recording, editing, video, music, etc) but it might
> grow to take a lot of screen space.

I think we could tackle that problem simply by merging more preference dialogs together.

Off the top of my head, the following preferences could go together:
- Keyboard and Keyboard Shortcuts
- Network configuration and Network proxy
- Appearance, Screen resolution, Screensaver, and Windows
- Personal File Sharing (gnome-user-share) and Remote Desktop

If you also look at the Administration menus then there are even more possible merges.

That is of course a problem.

I was going to suggest that "too big for 15" screens" was less of an
issue, than the actual resolution in pixels - but this depends on
whether the font and menu sizes are being scaled with the screen's
_physical_ DPI. I can't recall if that is the case or not.

Since people wanted to reduce the number of items in the preferences
menu, so if that were done - perhaps a few categories might have a
place. Dividing the long list into a few pieces IMO makes it more
navigable than one big long list without the space occupied by the
headings.

The XDG menu spec does have some adjustments to control how many items
are inlined before they get their own sub-menu. For menus (e.g.
"Electronics", or "Sound & Video"), I wonder if a different heuristic
would be useful.. you don't want to inline a heading for categories
which have just one item in them. You'd probably want to group such
icons into a virtual "Other" category.

Of course, we'd only show inlined headers if there are more than one in
a given menu.

The rules do become reasonably complex quite quickly, but I figured it
might work more easily for the preferences menu where the platform ships
most of its contents.


--
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!)

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-Natan