Re: Preferences [Was: a whole lot of other things, too]

[Dave Bordoley <bordoley msu edu>]

Anna:
Here are my comments on your proposal

genreal comments. not to be cruel but in general i do not like your
proposal. I think the current menus are very clean, and that we gain a
lot from having less in the menus and on the menu panel.

I still don't understand why we have a seperate desktop-preferences
directory either as a submenu of applications or as a pull-down menu.
Why not just use the nautilus view, or even the shell view, if speed is
such an issue. Just seems so counter intuitive to have preference
dialogs in the menus. Neither osX or gasps windows does this, and as for
kde, i rather not take ui advice from them (personal opinion).

That said i do like the idea of adding a help menu to the menu panel.

Also i like the term actions better than desktop. Actions is very
descriptinve of the contents of this pull down menu. As discussed before
desktop is a poor term, since it is poorly defined and can have varying
different meanings between operatings systems. Its probably best to
avoid the term.also while i'm talking about the actions menu i think
search for files is more descriptive than find.

Programs/applications menu:

1. Why use programs instead of applications. Applications is a nicer
word, seems more professional, programs is ugly as term for this menu
imho, and i believe this change was made on purpose.

If you are concerned about have an applications sub menu in
applications, well yes this is weird but the solution is to fix the
submenu, not to use a subpar term like programs.

2. I do not understand why there are addressbook and calendar folders.
My guess would be that most users only will use one of each of these
type of programs. (in my case evolution)

3. I really like your idea of replacing the current programming menu
with "software development" sound much more professional

4. Accesories sounds nicer than utilities and it is a standard windows
term new users will be able to easily associate with.

5. I think the current applications menu should be office.

6. system tools sounds better than settings.

7. I think most users would appreciate if kde programs were integrated
into gnome menus.

8. nautilus should never be listed by name anywhere in the menus. Users
shouldn't care what the file-manager is called. currently we just
include a link to the users home folder in the applications menu, and
this is probably the best thing to do.

Finally the thing that bothers me most about your menu proposal is that
it seems many of the decisions you have made are based on the fact that
you are running redhat, and redhat adds it's own items to the menu. IMHO
gnome should not based its menus based on redhat additions. It is
redhat's responsibility to make sure that they correctly integrate their
menu items into the gnome menu structure. (Btw i love redhat)

OK back to the preferences and system settings. I still think we should
just include links to nautilus preferences:, system-settings: and
server-settings: dirs rather than including every little configuration
program in the menus. Both macos and window use the filemanager to edit
system properties. We follow macos is so many other ways, Why not follow
them here too.

dave