Re: [Usability] Global Menu Bars

[Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues <lookkas gmail com>]

2005/4/18, Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>:
> One approach might be to only display the parent window's menu for
> dialogs, so the menu would become empty for normal windows that have no
> menu.

But this gives us a whole sort of problems with large apps that would
need to be fixed...

> In any case, this important difference between the OS X and free desktop
> environments need to be considered when evaluating the usefulness of it.
> Mac practically grew up with this behavior, so everything is optimized
> for it.

Good point. 

While I agree that having a global menu bar/applet would be awesome, I
don't think it's worth the effort, because:

1 - I don't think this would be a HUGE advantage usability-wise (Maybe
somewhat better, but not something that I would die for). I'm on the
oppinion that global menubars and per-app menubars are almost
equivalent solutions (slight lead for global menubars), with pros and
cons.

2 - The work to make the whole model "work"  will be HUGE ;)

So, maybe we should focus in other important usability work instead of
engaging on such a huge task.

Just my 2 cents :)