The menu panel

[Bart Kuik <kuik rendo dekooi nl>]

Hello,

As Gnome 1.4-user I use only the menu panel on top of the screen,
because I can put everything on it and it takes not much space on my 14"
screen. But there are two quite annoying useability-issues:

1. I expect items like 'clean up desktop' 'line up icons by...' in my
Desktop-menu with Nautilus, just like it was with Gmc. Nautilus claims
to be an integrated desktop-shell, so why don't they put these items in
the Desktop-menu? This feels like a gap between the panel and the
filemanager, and that's not the way it should be...

2. In the tasklist I miss an option like 'Hide Others', like in MacOS.
It happens quite much that I want just one app to be on the screen
simultaniously, so I manually have to minimize all the others and that's
not the way it should be. This feels like another gap in the interface,
but now between the panel and the windowmanager.

In my opinion a desktop can't be easy to use for the average user
without tight integration between the filemanager, the panel and the
windowmanager. It's too much three apps instead of one desktop by now.

Things like this,  and overlapping functionality and fragmentation are
quite ugly aspects of Gnome. Much is improved between 1.2 and 1.4, but
there's a long way to go for 2.0.....

Bart