unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Andrew Laignel wrote on 01/11/10 14:35:
>
> One thought on the global menu is one of scope.  Window controls, tab
> controls and many other actions, as a general rule, only affect things
> within their indicated container.  A tab control that affects things
> outside of it's scope is bad as it invites unpredictability into the
> behaviour, it's for this very reason that the URL bar is within the tab
> in Chrome.  Clicking on a window/document on the screen as a result
> will alter UI elements outside the implied document area, which just
> doesn't sit well with me.

Conversely, though, the complexity of functions a program needs to
present doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the width of its
windows. The worst example here is Gimp, which now opens a giant dummy
document window just to get around the problem that its menus don't fit
in the width of the toolbox window. Another example is Inkscape, which
imposes an annoyingly wide minimum width on windows (for example, if
you're drawing an icon) just so that it can fit the menus inside the
window. If you're using the global menu bar, the window can get narrower
(and it could be narrower still if the status bar was more cooperative).

> Besides, looking at my Windows 7 machine (I use OSX as my primary
> platform so am fairly unbiased) IE, Chrome, Firefox, Word and a growing
> list of applications simply don't use the file menu anymore, instead
> opting for more intuitive and friendly approaches.

I explained in <http://design.canonical.com/2010/05/menu-bar/> why I
disagree with the premise that they're "more intuitive and friendly".
They're optimizing for the individual application, at the expense of
overall consistency.

>                                                     It's 2010 and
> deciding on a global menu essentially embeds a potentially obsolete UI
> device into the heart of the entire look and feel of the OS – think
> Ericsson phones with the big stubby antenna that was their signature,
> which looked pretty stupid when Nokia developed the internal antenna.

Whether menus are a good way of exposing functions has nothing to do
with what year it is.

> If anything I would think that Apple now possibly consider the global
> menu bar a mistake but are too entrenched to do anything about it.  I
> appreciate Apple are known as 'the company' for UI design but to be
> totally frank OSX has languished in recent years with Apple putting all
> their time and effort into iOS which they are testing all their new UI
> ideas on and I've yet to see a single app on my iPad use something like
> the file menu – it is this that people should be looking to for
> inspiration rather than the 2000's OSX.

Of course the iPad doesn't use a File menu, it has a touch interface.
(And hides files almost completely.) But thinking that a touch interface
will work well on a desktop machine is just as wishful as thinking the
reverse.

> There seems to be this strange desire for the best part of a decade to
> keep the bar at the top, despite the fact that on traditional Gnome 80%
> is wasted space and the only truly useful thing on it – once you remove
> the global menu – is the time and that alone is certainly not worth
> losing 22px for.  Most of the controls in the top bar are there simply
> because there is space to fill and once you view it from the
> perspective of necessity it makes less sense.  As a general rule the
> more used a function the more exposed it should be, yet how many times
> a session does your average user use 'shut down' or fast user
> switching?
>...

Possibly the session menu should not be there -- but it should be
somewhere obviously system-ish.

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