Re: [Usability] A New Start Menu Design, which resemble windows

["Karoliina Salminen" <karoliina t salminen gmail com>]

Hi,

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 4:45 PM, Long Gao <imgaolong gmail com> wrote:
> happy to hear strong opposite opinions.
>
> I am users from windows, that is no shame. Jobs learned his ideas of GUI
> from Xerox.  But windows succeeded later. There must have something that
> could be learned in Windows.

You should note though that only the original ideas at the time of
MacOS 1 and Windows 1.0.
A pile of new innovation has happened on the MacOSX side since then.
You should not look where
something originates, because if you want to learn something new,
please try Leopard, or even better,
the Snow Leopard.

> Using a GtkWindow as a Start menu, I could add whatever I or you like on the
> start menu. I could add Tabs in a start menu, and many others.

I am using also KDE in addition to Gnome, and it has this kind of
start menu and I really dislike it.
Tabs have no useful use on start menu.

Think differently. How about a grid with kinetic scroll. Something like iPhone?
Don't say it can't be done, because it can be done. For example with
plain Gtk with some hacking,
and if you want to make it easier, there is the clutter toolkit
(http://www.clutter-project.org) that is good enough already for
implementing a desktop
based on it.

> sometime simple is better, but that might not be true for desktop users. If
> a tool is too simple, then the difficulty might be burdened on the users.
> Users might have to do much extra work to make simple tools work together.

Mac with no start menu is very good in my opinion. I have applications
folder in Finder where all the applications
are and then I have quick launch icons on my launch bar on the bottom,
similar than adding icons to the Gnome bar,
but in Mac, it is a way more elegant and easy to do - you just drag
application from Applications folder to the bar,
and that's it. The bar functions as switcher as well, there is the
small light that indicates that this application is running.
if the app is missing from bar when it is launched, it appears on the
bar with the light that indicates that it is on.
You have then context sensitive menu for different windows (e.g. if
you have browser with multiple windows, or if
you want to force quit some app). It is a completely different logic
than Windows, but I feel it is better this way.

You could have a compromise between Gnome/Windows/KDE and MacOSX: a
grid where you can drag items from applications folder,
similarly than in the MacOSX. You could have just a small button that
opens this grid on the screen (so that it wouldn't waste very much
space).
You could have some similar way to indicate than in MacOSX that app is
running or not. And this grid could be scrolled
with kinetic scroll. This is completely aligned with less is more and
you don't need to have any buttons to do these things,
as it would work just with drag & drop like it works on Mac. Of course
there are many ways to do this, but you should really not be thinking
how to do start menu, you should be thinking how to make the user to
run his or her applications and see if they are running and how to
switch
between the applications rather than being bound to a predefined
concept called start menu. Please think out of the box.
Don't think what has been done, think what has not been done, that
could be better. And I feel that even the Maemo start menu
with the categories, is a kind of compromise that has the "tabs" (or
folders) done right. It is very fast to use. The KDE-style multitab
start menu is slow to use and its behaviour is weird (imho).

Best Regards,
Karoliina