RE: Summary of my ideas (Updated)

["Chris Jones" <chris black-sun co uk>]

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Hi

> o Gnome is very good for powerusers, since there's a lot of freedom 
> of configurability. This is not so good for the newbies, or the
never 

Why isn't it good? If they don't really know what they are doing, they
are unlikely to be randomly looking through the menus to find the more
complex stuff. My experience of new users is that they learn how to do
the basics and ignore anything else that they don't directly need.

> Maybe we could also make a checkbox in the control-center, for 
> showing/hiding powersettings. 

I wonder what kind of performance hit would be incurred by every
single GNOME app running on the system checking with some setting
somewhere for each of it's widgets how competant the user is. It'll
only take a not terribly well thought out descision by the author and
all of a sudden, this newbie user can't access some really useful
function that he needs and he has to adjust his system-wide setting up
a level thereby exposing all these other options he's not supposed to
see.

IMHO it doesn't make sense.
 
> o I also think that we should define some rules for the wm-theme
authors, 
> so they can call their themes "gnome user friendly". This mean that 
> the buttons always does the same in such a theme; they are either 
> located in the same place, or the icon shows very well its function.


In the case of something like Enlightenment, there are tooltips for
the buttons that will do a perfectly good job of telling the user what
they do.

> o Add support for a global menu, like the mac one. This has some ui 
> advantages and some people like it. It should work this way: 

I have always detested that "feature" - I consider it to be highly
counter-intuitive. Menus work well when they are part of the window
they belong to, if only because you're not limited to a single menu
way off at the top of the screen.
 
> We should have a little grapper area, and if you drag from a window
menu 
> to the upper right of the screen (if thats the grapper area), 

Personally, I have panels on all four edges of my screen (top and
bottom fixed, left and right are usually hidden) and wouldn't take too
kindly to menus outside the edges of my desktop!

If you really must mess around with menus, what would be more useful
would be to have access to the menus of a program from it's entry in
the tasklist so that no matter which desktop you have the thing on, no
matter how deep it is in the window stack, you can get instant access
to it's menus (Windows provides some functionality for apps to put
custom menu trees in their taskbar buttons)
 
> This should *NOT* be a panel. The global menu should not support
applets
> (applets on a menu doesn't work), there should be no disappear
arrows 

If your idea is implemented, it would seem to make the most sense to
be a panel applet anyway.

> and only have a gnome menu and then the menus in the active
application.
> That's all. Maybe there should be an option to add a none-graphic
clock on
> the right (like on macs) but definately no support for applets.

So we are forcing a lack of menus and the lack of choice of clock onto
people? Why are you so keen on taking away user choice? That is what
GNOME is particularly good at.

> It should also be possible to drag this global menu to one of the 
> applications
> windows to make local menus instead. Thats one more reason for it
not to
> be a panel.

What if some people want some menus to work at the top of the screen,
but others to be local to the app window?
 
> It's about making it more userfriendly not the opposite.

It sounds to me that it's about making everything more confusing and
forcing choiceless solutions on people.

> This global menu makes it more easy to hit the menu, and it gives
more
> desktop space on small screens, if you're running more than one app.

I would argue that it is taking away desktop real estate - you are
going to lose a fair bit of space at the top of the desktop to this
menu bar - that is space wasting that is unnecessary because you can
put windows on top of each other if you are low on space.

How much sense does it make to have an inch square app running at the
bottom right corner of the screen, but to have it's menu appear at the
top of the screen? Not very much (especially if you have a large
ViewPort in X and the menu bar is actually outside the visible area of
the screen - that would REALLY piss people off.
It may work on Macs, but it brings a feeling of single-tasking that
doesn't fit properly when you have a multi-tasking environment that
may well be spread over many desktops and larger-than-monitor screens

- ---
 _____ _         _       _____
| __  | |___ ___| |_ ___|   __|_ _ ___        Chris "Ng" Jones
| __ -| | .'|  _| '_|___|__   | | |   |  chris@black-sun.co.uk
|_____|_|__,|___|_,_|   |_____|___|_|_|    www.black-sun.co.uk
            S o f t w a r e

 "Linux is beating Windows" - David Cole, Microsoft Executive

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