Re: [Usability] Global Menu Bars

[Matthew Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

Daniel Borgmann wrote:
> ...
> > Well, I'm currently in a "new mail" window, and the top bar is still 
> > the same. Every app simply has it's own top-menu and child windows 
> > indeed don't alter it. And dialogs arent of any concern, as dialogs in 
> > osx don't even have a window border; they suspend down from their 
> > parent's window titlebar.
>
> Great, there we have our first huge problem. ;) Changing all
> applications to never use different menus for child windows is certainly
> not reasonable. If there is no elegant solution to this, it could well
> be a showstopper.

It's slightly undesirable, but by no means a showstopper. In Mozilla and
(IIRC) Firefox for Mac OS X, for example, when you open a window like
View Source, the Bookmarks menu disappears (because the menu bar for
that window is designed to be minimal on other platforms). Is that
undesirable? Yes, because you can't get to the bookmarks window
depending on the rather irrelevant issue of whether a browser window or
a source window has focus. Is it a showstopper? No, plenty of people
still use Firefox on the Mac.

> One approach might be to only display the parent window's menu for
> dialogs,

.... and deactivate all its items. That would be good because it would
preserve stability in the interface (the menu bar wouldn't be emptying 
completely for a couple of seconds while a dialog is open, then
reverting to exactly the same contents), and because it would 
subliminally help indicate which window the dialog belonged to.

For bonus points, a parent window could (but wouldn't have to) do 
something special to say to the menu system "this is the X item", for X 
= {undo, redo, cut, copy, paste, delete, select all}, even if those 
items have different wording or position than usual (e.g. "Edit" > 
"Select" > "All" for a DTP program with so many selection commands that 
they have their own submenu). Then when a dialog is opened, the global 
menu bar can deactivate every item *except* the X items, and 
automatically do The Right Thing when those editing items are chosen 
within a text field in the dialog.

> so the menu would become empty for normal windows that have no
> menu.

Or those windows could have a bare-bones menu bar consisting of "File" >
"Close", "Edit" > {the seven editing items listed above}, and the
omnipresent "Help" > "Gnome Help".

--
Matthew Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/