[Usability] Panel popup proposal

[Daniele Levorato <daniele levorato infocamere it>]

First of All... HI! I'm a newbye here even if I'm using gnome since 1997...
... and sorry for my English (I'm italian)...
I have a suggestion about panels popup menu... perhaps someone has 
already posted something similar however I don't know :-)
It is as simple as that: now in Gnome panels (well, I'm really using 2.4 
not 2.6 yet) a right-click raises the popup menu, contextually with the 
widget you clicked on... for example on "Lock screen" icon you'll obtain 
all the lock-screen specific menu items, then a separator and the 
default items (Romove, lock, move). In my opinion this is not enought, 
even "parent" widget specific menu items should be desplayed, allowing 
user to access that menu without trying to find an "empy" place on the 
parent to click on. In fact now if you want (for example) to add a new 
botton or access main-panel properties you have to "find an empty space" 
on the bar for right-cliking... but it's not a good GUI design. Take 
"eclipse" platform as example: each right-click brings up a context menu 
which is generated bringing together all the action related to that 
object and to the parent one, and the parent of the porent and so on.
I have no problem with Gnome behavior, since I know him... but I've 
noticed that many of my collegues trying to use it (I'm promoting gnome 
and linux in my company) found some problems with that... and thought it 
was no possible to add a button to the main panel...
Trying to explain them that they should first of all "create" the space 
on the bar moving the other buttons and then right-click on free space I 
felt they were wondering if I was mad or something :-)
What do you think? ... in my opinion this enhancement in usability makes 
sense and is already implemented in other well.designed GUI (see 
"eclipse")...