Re: [Ayatana] Global Menu on the Desktop

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Luke Benstead wrote on 01/11/10 13:40:
>...
> When they were implemented in UNE we had a great blog post by MPT about
> the reasoning: http://design.canonical.com/2010/05/menu-bar/
> 
> It made sense. Netbooks have limited vertical space, UNE focuses one
> window at a time, global menus are a perfect fit.
> 
> At the same time Mark posted on his blog
> (http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/359) with the following
> quote:
> 
> "There are outstanding questions about the usability of a panel-hosted
> menu on much larger screens, where the window and the menu could be
> very far apart. Those questions are greatly diminished in the netbook
> environment, by definition."

So, what's relevantly different for notebook and desktop computers,
compared to netbook computers? Two things: they have a larger screen,
and they're more powerful.

That larger screen slows down the action of travelling to a menu. But it
doesn't slow that action down five-fold. It doesn't slow it down nearly
as much as putting menus inside the window would.

The greater power means you're more likely to be running multiple
programs, which makes a global menu bar both more and less compelling
than on a netbook. It's less compelling in that you're more likely to
have to click in a window before using its menus. It's more compelling
in that it avoids the problem Microsoft discovered where people were
confusing menus from background windows with menus in the active window.

>...
> Perhaps we could start removing menus, and specifying a standard,
> consistent way to do so (e.g. like Chrome).

I don't know why you call it standard and consistent. Have you even seen
Chrome's Edit menu "item"? :-)

>                                             Perhaps the menus should
> appear in the huge space we've opened up to the right of the title bar.
> Perhaps there is another way to go, or perhaps we already have an
> optimal setup. We won't know without doing usability testing and making
> sure we aren't making a mistake.
> 
> Instead, we appear to be plagiarizing Apple's menubar just because we
> can.

That's incorrect. There are many Apple things that we can do but we
won't, because they're silly. Application menus, for example, or sheets.

> On top of that it currently won't be consistent as not all the
> common UI toolkits support it.
>...

One important task for Natty is to get Firefox and Thunderbird using
native menus. Another is to get OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice using native
menus.

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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