Re: GMenuModel has landed

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Fri, 2011-12-09 at 00:25 -0500, Ryan Lortie wrote:
> hi,
> 
> On Thu, 2011-12-08 at 19:24 -0800, John Ralls wrote:
> > I think that you misunderstand how mac os works. 
> > 
> > Yes, a single menu bar is displayed at the top of the screen. This is
> > correct behavior according to Fit's Law, because you can bang the
> > pointer to the top of the screen and it can't overshoot.
> > 
> > No, applications are not limited to having a single menu bar. It's a
> > one-liner to switch menubars when different window (or notebook tab,
> > for that matter) gets focus.
> 
> This is obviously true from the fact that an application can detect
> which window has focus and the fact that the items in a menu can be
> changed, but it has to be done manually and is exceedingly uncommon in
> native mac os applications.

When designing for the Mac (or for a different global-menu-bar interface
like Unity), you probably don't want to make the set of menu options
bounce around depending on what window is selected.

But the jump from there to the idea that when you *do* have a per-window
menu, it should be the same for every application window seems
unwarranted.

Let's not fall into the fallacy that you can write one piece of code
without any conditionalization and have it be a well-designed UI for:

 Mac
 Windows
 GNOME
 Unity
 KDE

That's not possible, and we should concentrate on letting app developers
create applications that are competitive with native applications, even
if that means doing different things on different environments.

- Owen