-----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. > 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. > 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.) > 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. And "Check For Updates" is, in Ubuntu and other Gnome-based OSes, the job of the OS rather than the application. >... > 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. - -- 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
