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On 08/06/2010 06:17 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: It lets people see what application window they have open more clearly than looking for clues such as a super-tiny icon or the window title, which sometimes does not say the name of the application (like this Thunderbird window, which says "Write: Re: [Usability] [Ayatana] The Future of Window Borders, Menu Bars,-" (it cuts off there) or if the screen is in direct sunlight. I know this is a Thunderbird window because I opened it with Thunderbird and I'm used to this behavior, but what about people with mental or visual disabilities/deficiencies, or people that aren't used to how E-mail clients work? They shouldn't be excluded; GNOME is just as much for me as it is somebody that wasn't made the same way as I was or somebody that isn't used to GNOME, and I'd hate to leave them out.-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Ryan Peters wrote on 30/07/10 21:05:... GNOME 3 comes out next year. With it comes many new technologies including the Application Menu, a message tray for non-system applications, and GTK+ 3. The GNOME Shell design page <http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design> has an interesting page on the Application Menu (aka AppMenu) <http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/AppMenu>, a feature coming in GNOME Shell.I think an application menu like that might have made sense in the 1980s, or even when it appeared in Mac OS X in 2000, but today it would be an incoherent waste of space. What sense does it make to have a menu that's labelled "Calculator" when doing a calculation, "Banshee" when you're playing music, and "Empathy" when you're chatting with friends -- but "Firefox" when you're writing e-mail, "Firefox" when you're buying books, "Firefox" when you're reading the news, "Firefox" when you're playing Farmville, "Firefox" when you're posting on a Web forum, and "Firefox" when you're watching Hulu? Not much sense at all. Also, what sense would it make to have the menu do different things for every tab? People know what a web browser is. The menu doesn't control the page, but rather the application that renders a page. For OpenOffice.org, the menu wouldn't say "editing my resume" or "designing a website" or "putting numbers of some sort into a table", would it? No, because that's things that people use OOo for and they know that it's all the same program; same with Firefox. Then I'd assume that GNOME Shell would help them understand the distinction even better because it makes a larger difference now.The menus that Chrome and Firefox and Opera and every other application with menus are often relevant to two different things at once: the window and the application.In our user testing of Rhythmbox (results to be published real soon now), one consistent result was that no-one understood the distinction between "Close" and "Quit". In other words, they didn't distinguish between the window and the application. Hence why I said "maybe". I agree that those are very window-specific decisions, and I wasn't sure whether or not they would make sense in the menu (they will probably be left out).The difference between the two is that there are some options, such as Open File, Print, or the View menu that only affect the current window, and some options such as Preferences, options for Add-Ons,Preferences and add-ons are the strongest case for a menu that applies to the application in general.Bookmarks, (maybe) History,Both of those are window-specific. (Modern Web browsers show a global history in any "History" menu, but actually choosing any of the items affects only the current window.) Maybe that could be implemented. The Help option now would simply open the standard help menu for the application at the beginning. Context-sensitiveness could be possible, thought I don't know how the GNOME devs feel about it.Help, Check for Updates, and About, that affect the entire program, meaning every open window."About" is a fair example. But "Help" should be context-sensitive whenever possible -- showing help relevant to the window you choose it from. Not quite. GNOME has no "official" package manager. Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and so on, do. GNOME by itself exists without a package manager, and there are quite a few people that don't use package managers. While it is less organized, and package managers are why so many people love using Linux, a Check for Updates option (which is built into every version of Firefox) would make sense if it isn't disabled (and most package maintainers ship Firefox with this option disabled because of package managers).And "Check For Updates" is, in Ubuntu and other Gnome-based OSes, the job of the OS rather than the application. Have you even looked at the page detailing the menu, or even tried the work-in-progress menu? It doesn't mimic the menu. In fact there are several differences. Mainly, Mac's menu bar has every single menu bar option, while GNOME's only has those relevant to the application to reduce confusion among new users and making the desktop seem more integrated and organized. Therefore, it isn't "familiar" to Mac developers because it works in a totally different way (drop-down instead of immediately accessible, yet taking up less space). It doesn't ignore any historical context; the page detailing the menu as well as the design document are very, very detailed and instead of directly moving forward, they're simply taking a step back, looking at what they have, and how they can improve it for everybody. That's not just people who are used to GNOME, or people used to other OSs, or people without visual or mental problems, or "power users", but everybody they can. You'd be amazed at the level of detail they're approaching this project with and the questions they ask while doing so.... tl;dr The GNOME Shell Application Menu is what should be utilized instead of mimicking Windows for the sake of being "shiny" or "familiar". Remember, you can't innovate and try to be completely familiar at the same time. ...Or to put it another way: The Gnome Shell application menu mimicks the Mac OS X application menu almost exactly. It may seem "shiny" or "familiar" to those designers who use a Mac, but it is obsolete today and ignores the historical context that led Apple to introduce it in the first place. PS: No I'm not a "GNOME Fanboy". I just don't see why we (the Ubuntu community) shouldn't cooperate with upstream instead of doing our own thing, so as to increase Linux's adoption in the long run. - -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkxb70sACgkQ6PUxNfU6ecq3RwCdFXplkgW3X4e+6nOtKvY6w7rn MN8AoJTEEVZtzCpgj5PrZ5iH/5Pyyi+C =kQ5N -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ usability mailing list usability gnome org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability |