Re: App menu Help/About consistency

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Carlos Garcia Campos <carlosgc gnome org> wrote:

>
> Nautilus has 4 buttons - 2 menus and 2 presets for views.
> Documents has NONE, just a magnifying glass and a check button...
> Evince has nothing in the app menu, and 2 impossibly unorganized window
> menus - I never know which one to open...

Evince has help in the app menu, and it doesn't have About because the
implementation is a modal dialog attached to a specific window. It has a
view menu and a gear menu, and I agree it's not easy to know which
options are in each menu. It's not even obvious that the view menu is
shown by pressing on the button.

Not to pick on evince, but I do think people make a bit too much of the 'can't be window-specific' rule. Our app menu technology can deal just fine with window-specific actions in the app menu - they apply to the currently active window. I don't think that is very problematic or confusing to users. The much more important rule is that the app menu should not hide actions that are frequently or even just regularly needed when interacting with the application - those are much better off inside the window.