Re: Revisit "your name on the top bar"

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

Thanks Dan. Developer input is helpful.

On Tue, 2011-07-05 at 08:54 -0400, Dan Winship wrote:
> (Not subscribed, responding to a bunch of messages from the archive...)
> 
> 1. Yes, the developers refer to it as "the user menu". We have to call
> it something since "theUsersNameOnTheTopBar" isn't a very nice variable
> name. But this doesn't necessary mean that the docs need to call it the
> same thing (ie, we call the top bar "the panel").

Indeed, we have all sorts of things we call things as developers
that we don't expose to users. I would never use the word "widget"
in user-oriented help, for example. Not that "user menu" is in the
same class of geek-speak as "widget", but it's still not something
that's actively exposed (as a term) in the UI.

Now, if it were exposed in the UI, then it would definitely be in
our best interest to use the term. In the case of "top bar", we
actually got the one (not very prominent) mention of panel changed
to top bar (Ctrl+Alt+Tab).

>     1a. FWIW, Ubuntu users almost universally refer to it as "the me
>         menu"

Not surprising. Absent other terms being given to them, people will
just use the names of the closest thing they can find. The user menu
has aspects of both the me menu and the power menu though.

> 2. Probably something everyone is already used to, but if you refer to
> it by position, note that it's "the menu in the upper *left* corner" in
> RTL languages.

Right, we generally don't worry about that, because we'd all go nuts
if we did. We expect translators to handle that when translating the
docs. And in the (unfortunately common) case where RTL-language users
have to read English docs, we just hope that anybody educated enough
to be bilingual can figure out that the directions are swapped.

--
Shaun