unity-design team mailing list archive

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 5:16 AM, Andrew Laignel <a.laignel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> It seems to me, UI wise anyway, that there is a movement away from having a
> traditional program menu.  The most recent browsers (FF, Chrome, IE) have
> buried it and in applications such as media players and basic photo managers
> it's also getting sidelined as it tends to be more of a junkstore than a
> valid UI tool.

Chrome's menu is NOT buried. It is presented in the toolbar, in the
same space as the address bar, back and Refresh button.

I'll give you one difference between Chrome's menu and everyone
else's. It is (well, was, in its glory day) grouped by _specific_
nouns relevant to the software at hand: Page and Application. The Page
menu is all stuff that happens within the open page. The Application
menu is all stuff that happens outside the current page.
So, using the menu is a system of selecting the subject and then the action.
As an extra bonus, extensions can add Browser Actions, which go right
beside Chrome's existing menus. Again, the subject (the extension) is
what faces the user. They're all a little different, but isn't that a
lot tidier than having extensions bury whatever options they want,
wherever they want, across six verb-first menus?

If Chrome was an over-engineered, complex application that dealt with
six different subjects you would see six menus there, but I'll bet
they would still be better organized than the pile of View / Edit /
Help / Tools / File menus you see in other applications. Lots of other
apps, unfortunately, are oblivious to that and only borrow the idea of
having a single menu button.

If we wanted to actually seriously approach the problem of menus being
painful to work with, the first thing is to consider how they are
organized. How well researched was the HIG's suggestion that menus be
organized like Verb › Subject (with the odd exception)? Is it still
relevant in 2010?


Okay, away from my rant and back to the original post :) The global
menu is being used specifically in Unity to save some vertical space
where it is in short supply. A window is maximized by default, then
the title bar and menu is stuck in the panel. On a larger desktop,
that would not make sense.
The desktop is a very different space, so doing the global menu there
is a completely different problem.

Having said that, the system being used to implement the global menu
is pretty cool and it's possible to turn it on anywhere for those who
are so inclined.


I do have a vaguely related question for those handling the app menu stuff:
Is the menu still shown on a top panel when a when a window is not
maximized, or should it detach from the panel and be displayed as
usual in that case (like the title bar does)?



Dylan