Re: global menubars in GTK+

[Nemes Sorin <nemes sorin gmail com>]

global menu bar from Usability point of view ...

I am a designer interested in Man - Machine interaction.
Regarding global menu in Gnome, I spent a 2 weeks using globalmenubar 
being curious to find in which mode my workflow will be affected (Speed 
? Comfort ? ...).

Well after 2 full weeks - I can tell you all - when you have a huge LCD 
/ CRT ( you are designer or DTP guy ) global menu is not an option - 
because you have to cross a lot of screen areas with the mouse cursor - 
when is not the right case.

For example, having multiple windows on a big screen ( 16/10 ) -> a 
color picker, a Nautilus instance  ( sized at 500x500 ) and an Inkscape 
/ GIMP / OpenOffice window ( 800x800 ) - on the area of the screen which 
is on the right area -> you will use a lot more time doing normal 
things  because for each non trivial command ( as copy paste or 
drag-drop or a shortcut command ), where you need menu bar options you 
will have to do a lot more mouse movement just to reach the upper top 
screen zone where the globalmenubar is located.

With widescreens even on a mac globalmenu loose it's sense.

For the case of big screens - normal layout for menus ( old, orthodox 
paradigm ) is more productive.

Normally a designer, working on a big screen, will keep  2 or more 
opened windows on the same time.  Now imagine GIMP - you can not assign 
all commands with shortcuts - for any filter (I have ~ 200 filters ) 
which is not assigned to a shortcut, you have to cross all screen again 
with the mouse cursor because of the global menu bar location. Without 
globalmenu I can do the shortest way with the mouse - because my mouse 
is in the canvas window so is very close with the menubar. For 
repetitive tasks which request menu commands - global menu can be a 
worst thing.

From an usability point of view, I think the globalmenu is a death case 
on the era of wide / big screens - even for MacIntosh.

Same case with the Microsoft ribbon - they don't preview the big screen 
era  ;) so on a widescreen laptop the amount of vertical space used by 
the MS ribbon is huge. Red Office ( the chinese Open Office )  has 
discovered the right (old) paradigm for the wide-screens - the lateral 
ribbon ( inspector ) - and Gnome need an infrastructure for implementing 
fluid layouts - lateral floating inspectors ( like Mac has ) / vertical 
ribbons, etc, accelerated canvas.

Finally - implementation of global menu in gnome core - can have a 
single reason - to help Mac Users to use Gnome ( but the point is to 
help the huge mass of Windows users ).

My 5 cents ...

SorinN

On 05/25/2009 08:59 AM, Davyd Madeley wrote:
> (oh no, not this again)
>
> I was looking at the variety of different methods that are now being
> employed on different platforms (MacOSX, Hildon, etc.) to implement
> global menubar type options, and was wondering if we couldn't get some
> synergy happening in GTK+.
>
> I had a look at rhult's IGE [1] and came to the conclusion that it
> wasn't really an optimal solution to the problem because:
>
>       1. it's working from GtkWidgets (i.e. GtkMenuItem), which seems
>          like a faulty abstraction.. it would be much better to work from
>          GtkAction
>       2. it provides API to rearrange items in the menubar (e.g. for
>          MacOSX), which seems wrong to me
>
> After thinking about this for a bit, it seems to me like it would be
> better to build an API based on GtkUIManager for the following reasons:
>
>       1. Everything connects to a GtkAction
>       2. It would be possible to pass a different .ui file per platform
>          or use menu-merging to rearrange parts of the menu layout per
>          platform
>       3. Setting shortcut keys for actions could be easily done via a
>          macro [2] in the API or in the app
>
> This API would be implemented as a module that allowed for simple
> overriding (e.g. for MacOSX, an embedded UI or even desktop GNOME).
>
> My initial thought is something simple like:
>
>          gtk_has_global_menu (void) ->  Boolean
>          gtk_ui_manager_set_global_menu (GtkUIManager *manager, char *path) ->  void
>
> This sort of API could be made available in an external library, but it
> seems like something that could be quite useful inside GTK+.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> --davyd
>
> [1] http://live.gnome.org/GTK%2B/OSX/Integration
> [2] #ifdef MACOSX
>      #define SHORTCUT(c) ("<Command>" x)
>      #else
>      #define SHORTCUT(x) ("<Ctrl>" x)
>      #endif
>
>