On 07/29/2010 10:35 AM, Martin Owens wrote:
May I add my own view of this? *ahem*: (tl;dr version at the bottom)On Thu, 2010-07-29 at 18:28 +0800, Allan Caeg wrote:Conventions in Windows and OS X are evolving (see the ribbon interface and app buttons on Office, Paint, etc.) while the Linux desktop is limited (probably) because we can't make new things work everywhere (different window managers, desktop environments, etc.).I think it's more important to have standards in data format and communication, than to have standards in interfaces across competing products. Internal design consistency is very important and that can only really be achieved with standards. Insisting on a left aligned set of window buttons is something you can only do within a distro, it's hard to enforce that sort of thing on your collaborators, let alone your competitors. So it's best not to standardise the look and feel of the product when it's pretty much the one feature that separates various products in the market. Applications should tell the desktop what they mean, not what they want. I think things like the windicators and the indicators are going in the right direction, but communication is only very slowly getting better. I remember the almost flaming row I had with DX-Gould at UDS-J about removing the indicators. The impression I got was not what the results have turned into and I would have been quite happy to accept the current design had it been possible to explain at the time. Martin, _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp GNOME 3 comes out next year. With it comes many new technologies including the Application Menu, a message tray for non-system applications, and GTK+ 3. The GNOME Shell design page has an interesting page on the Application Menu (aka AppMenu), a feature coming in GNOME Shell. The menus that Chrome and Firefox and Opera and every other application with menus are often relevant to two different things at once: the window and the application. The difference between the two is that there are some options, such as Open File, Print, or the View menu that only affect the current window, and some options such as Preferences, options for Add-Ons, Bookmarks, (maybe) History, Help, Check for Updates, and About, that affect the entire program, meaning every open window. The Firefox Button makes sense on something like Windows because Windows doesn't have a menu like this. On Mac, the button doesn't make sense because of the global menu bar. On Linux, it's unclear because there are so many different conventions with which to do things, some more efficient than others. Remember: All that the Firefox Button does is re-package the menu bar in a more compact space on the window border, that is it. It's simply re-organizing the current menu structure into a drop-down menu. Each operating system and desktop environment does things differently and this is expected. Windows users often complain about how hard to use Mac is, Mac users complain how hard to use Windows is, KDE users complain how hard to use GNOME is, GNOME users complain how hard to use KDE is and so on because they are used to different things. Each OS has their own way of being efficient and organized with their own unique styles. People switching from Windows to Mac or Linux do so partially because of this; it's told as being easy to use once you are used to it. The Application Menu is one of GNOME 3's unique quirks, which is, in my opinion, for the better. It works like this: The parts of the menu bar that are relevant to the application as a whole go into the Application Menu, so that no matter what window you have open, you can still access "entire-application functions", while the things that modify the window alone stay there. This mockup shows how it could work for Firefox. The Application Menu page I linked to at the beginning says this menu could be used to hold the following types of options:
tl;dr The GNOME Shell Application Menu is what should be utilized instead of mimicking Windows for the sake of being "shiny" or "familiar". Remember, you can't innovate and try to be completely familiar at the same time. - Ryan Peters |