Re: [Usability] [Ayatana] The Future of Window Borders, Menu Bars, and More

[Remco <remco47 gmail com>]

On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 15:46, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt canonical com> wrote:
> In this scenario someone is using (for example) Calculator, Banshee,
> Empathy, Gmail, Amazon, CNN, Farmville, the Gundam AnimeSuki Forum, and
> Hulu respectively. That they are using Firefox for 70% of these things
> does not mean it is useful or informative for "Firefox" to appear in the
> corner of the screen while doing them -- just as, for example, "Gnome"
> or "Xorg" or "Ubuntu" or "GNU" or "Linux" shouldn't. Taking up that much
> screen space with any of those brands may well be good for their
> vendors, but it is not relevant to user goals.

Oh, but you're not directly using Gmail, or Amazon, or CNN, or
Farmville, or any of those sites. You're using a browser to view them.
This browser has a URL bar, a back button, bookmarks, history,
extensions, tabs. You can pretend that a web page is a normal
application (with Prism and those kinds of things), but that's a whole
other thing. If you're using a browser, then the application menu
which will allow you to manipulate that browser is a useful feature.

Now, if you create a Prism app from a web page, then it would make
sense that the web page itself fills that menu. This is something that
Prism developers would have to figure out though.

> You're assuming the point. Why should I care that it's a "Thunderbird"
> window? That matters only if I often use multiple e-mail clients and
> need to distinguish between them.

Or if you use Thunderbird instead of the default email client in
Ubuntu. Brands exist to reduce confusion. They allow people to talk
about the software they are using.

> If you have a document open in Microsoft Word and a spreadsheet open in
> Microsoft Excel, and you choose "Quit" from Excel's application menu on
> the Mac (or "Exit" from its Office button on Windows), the spreadsheet
> will close. But if you had the same document open in OpenOffice.org
> Writer, and the same spreadsheet open in OpenOffice.org Calc, and you
> chose "Quit" from OpenOffice.org's app menu in Gnome Shell, the
> spreadsheet would close, and -- surprise! -- the document would close too.
>
> Why? Because Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel happen to be coded as
> separate applications, but OpenOffice.org Writer and OpenOffice.org
> Calc happen to be coded as a single application. Given how far off you
> were in thinking people knew what a Web browser was, please excuse me
> for not taking your word for it when you claim that people "know that
> [OpenOffice.org] is all the same program".
>
> The app menu does not introduce this problem, but it does perpetuate it
> and enshrine it. And "Quit" is given as the first example of an item
> justifying the menu's existence at all.

The bug seems to be that users don't expect Writer and Calc to be the
same application. Instead of getting rid of a menu which would trigger
this bug more often, it would be better to actually make them behave
as separate applications.

-- 
Remco