On 08/07/2010 08:46 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:Sorry, got confused for a minute....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 It may seem "shiny" or "familiar" to those designers who use a Mac, but it is obsolete today and ignores the historical context that led Apple to introduce it in the first place.Have you even /looked/ at the page detailing the menu <http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/AppMenu>,Yes, that's why I'm writing.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 applicationThat's not relevant. We were discussing the app menu, not the menu bar as a whole. GNOME does take it into context, but they see the global menu bar that Mac uses as a bad thing. The reasoning behind them using an application menu, from what I can gather, is that if they used the entire global menu bar system that Mac uses, it would take too long to open menus. To open a menu for one window or for one application, you'd first have to select it and then move your mouse all the way to the top of the screen. While this reduces aiming slightly, it takes longer to do, thus the GNOME design team (if I remember correctly) hates it. They do, however, see value in the application menu portion. Here's two usage examples:to reduce confusion among new users and making the desktop seem more integrated and organized.Those are new claims that you're making without evidence.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).They are both pull-down menus, taking up almost exactly the same amount of space. The biggest difference is that the Gnome version uses the application icon (in quite a stylish way), while the Mac version does not.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. ...These are examples of what I meant by giving historical context for a design: <http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/notification-area/> <http://design.canonical.com/2010/05/menu-bar/> In contrast, <http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/AppMenu> (and the equivalent section of <http://people.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20091114.pdf>) doesn't even mention the Mac application menu, let alone Nextstep or the Microsoft Office button. Of course, the Gnome Shell designers are under no obligation to explain the similarities and differences, but I think if they did, it would substantially improve their designs. 1) A user uses an instant messenger, such as Pidgin. The instant messenger has a different menu bar on the conversation window compared to the buddy list. The options on the conversation window only affect the currently active conversation, while the menu bar on the "buddy list" has options that affect both the window and the application as a whole. If you only have the conversation window open, or the buddy list window is on another workspace or minimized, you can still access "entire-application options" from the conversation window by using the Application Menu. Things such as smiley settings, preferences, plugins, enabling or disabling accounts, or the help function could be moved to the application menu. 2) After clicking a "malto:" link in your web browser, a composer window for your email program opens. The menu bar for your composer window compared to the main window is different, but the main window isn't open. The Application Menu would still allow for you to open your preferences, account information, add-on settings, and so on. The rest of the menu bar items will stay there. 3) Suppose that somebody opens a program in Wine. Windows applications natively don't support the Application Menu, so the Application Menu could instead be populated with Wine-related options such as a shortcut to open "winecfg". So GNOME Shell's application menu has the following benefits, as I have pointed out earlier:
Back on topic, should there be a "Firefox Button" on Linux? Absolutely not:
- Ryan Peters |