[Usability]Re: The whole panel focus/keynav thing

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:

> I'm fine with this but want to add one thing to the situation that would
> help a lot.  It is my understanding that Gnome2 makes it easy to merge
> menus together - wouldn't it be good to have every applet automatically
> merge in the panel menu too ? Right now I keep the "hide" buttons on my
> panel around just in case I want to make changes to the panel.
>
> And this one could then also be done without taking an extra key
> combination away from apps ;) if an object on the panel is focused, just
> make it pop up a menu with the general panel menu merged in at the bottom
> with a line between them.

That would certainly make life easier, but I'm not sure it would be very
usable the way things are right now.  For one thing, the menu would be
pretty big, 12 or more items depending on the applet-- that's too big
for a popup menu IMHO.  There would also be some duplication problems...
for example, you would have Panel Help and Applet Help; Panel
Preferences and Applet Preferences; and About Panel and About Applet,
with the same icons for each pair.  Of course you would have different
text labels in each case, but I think it would still be quite confusing.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems