Re: [Usability] Re: New "Add to panel" dialog

[Evandro Fernandes Giovanini <evandrofg ig com br>]

Em Sex, 2005-11-04 às 16:46 +0000, Calum Benson escreveu:
> On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 14:55 +0100, Estradin Solaris wrote:
> 
> > Why not have two different kinds of panels? The "System Panel" (home of menu-applets, menus,
> > system-wide notifications, etc...) and the "Desktop Panel" (home of
> > app-switchers, window-switchers, app-launchers, desktop-switchers,
> > etc, etc...). Maybe calling them both 'panels' would still be wrong,
> > but you know what I mean. Anyway, maybe we would be sacrificing a bit
> > of customisability (is that a word??), but it would make the user
> > experience a bit more uniform... I don't know.
> 
> Well, that's kind of what we had in the GNOME 2.0 days, when we had a
> 'menu panel' (which could only go at the top of the screen, and always
> had the Applications/Actions menus on it), and ordinary panels.  
> 

I agree that the current layout could be improved. The panel is an empty
space where you add objects (applets), and there are over 30 different
objects you can add to the panel, and they have different behaviours.
Having two of the same thing (panel) doesn't make it easier to use
either.

An idea is that instead of having a top panel with the menu and a few
applets and the bottom panel with another set of applets, we could have
a menu and a panel. Docs would refer to them as "The Global Menu"  and
"The Panel". The 'applets' on the menu all behave like menu items (you
can navigate between all after a single click on one of them; there's no
context menu and you use a capplet to configure it).
"The Panel" holds the applets that don't work as menu items. You can add
applets to it, and advanced users could create extra panels too (though
I think ideally they shouldn't have to. I don't see people asking for
extra docks on OS X, for example, even though it has a number of
usability problems). 

Cheers,
Evandro