unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Ryan Peters wrote on 30/07/10 21:05:
>...
> 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
> <http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design> has an interesting page on
> the Application Menu (aka AppMenu)
> <http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/AppMenu>, a
> feature coming in GNOME Shell.

I think an application menu like that might have made sense in the
1980s, or even when it appeared in Mac OS X in 2000, but today it would
be an incoherent waste of space.

What sense does it make to have a menu that's labelled "Calculator" when
doing a calculation, "Banshee" when you're playing music, and "Empathy"
when you're chatting with friends -- but "Firefox" when you're writing
e-mail, "Firefox" when you're buying books, "Firefox" when you're
reading the news, "Firefox" when you're playing Farmville, "Firefox"
when you're posting on a Web forum, and "Firefox" when you're watching
Hulu? Not much sense at all.

>                        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.

In our user testing of Rhythmbox (results to be published real soon
now), one consistent result was that no-one understood the distinction
between "Close" and "Quit". In other words, they didn't distinguish
between 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,

Preferences and add-ons are the strongest case for a menu that applies
to the application in general.

>                                           Bookmarks, (maybe) History,

Both of those are window-specific. (Modern Web browsers show a global
history in any "History" menu, but actually choosing any of the items
affects only the current window.)

> Help, Check for Updates, and About, that affect the entire program,
> meaning every open window.

"About" is a fair example. But "Help" should be context-sensitive
whenever possible -- showing help relevant to the window you choose it
from. And "Check For Updates" is, in Ubuntu and other Gnome-based OSes,
the job of the OS rather than the application.

>...
> 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.
>...

Or to put it another way: The Gnome Shell application menu mimicks the
Mac OS X application menu almost exactly. It may seem "shiny" or
"familiar" to those designers who use a Mac, but it is obsolete today
and ignores the historical context that led Apple to introduce it in the
first place.

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