Josselin Mouette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Le mercredi 25 juillet 2007 à 08:54 -0400, Marvin Renich a écrit : >> Gnome and KDE are targeted primarily at desktop users, not servers. If, >> as a desktop user, I install a graphical app on my machine, I *expect* >> to see that app in the main menu. The place where I put important >> and/or frequently used apps is on a panel/toolbar. > > Do you expect to see console applications in the menu as well?
With some exceptions, no. > All > interpreters and shells? No. > Window managers? Yes, in an appropriate category. *That* one could be a candidate for hiding. If I'm not mistaken KDE, Gnome and friends only work with certain window managers, so switching doesn't make sense. >> This is >> completely *un*usable. The more novice the user, the more important it >> is for the *default* to be for all graphical apps to be shown. Then let >> the individual user decide which ones are important to him/her. > > If the users installs the distribution with default settings or starts a > session on a multi-user setup, he should find a usable menu, ACK > not a menu > with all possible applications he never wanted to install. That depends... But indeed, on a multi-user system the local admin should be able to taylor the default menu according to their expectations of the users. In the same line, a maintainer of a desktop environment might do the same. I don't like the latter, but it would be just one *more* reason for me not to use a desktop environment, so I don't care much. >> Menus, by their nature, are inherently unusable for the most frequently >> used apps, and we should not be trying to make them more usable at the >> expense of making less frequently used apps harder to access. > > Why shouldn't we attempt to make menus usable? Because, as Marvin wrote in the text you cite, the drawback is that it makes less frequently used applications harder to access. There are other ways to make menus usable even for frequently used applications, without these drawbacks: For example, if a user can influence the order of entries, that would help much more. But I agree with Marvin (and that's also my usage scheme) that menus should provide access to the less frequently used applications, not the ones started very often. I don't have toolbars in my WM, but it starts the frequently used apps without asking me, so I use the menu for the rare ones. >> Menus make less frequently used apps easy to get at, while toolbars make >> frequently used apps even easier; use the right tool for the right job. > > Guess what, toolbars are not used by a good share of users. Toolbars > sound obvious for experienced users, but a novice will never have the > idea to modify the interface that is shown to him; which is why this > interface must be as straightforward as possible - and that also > includes good default shortcuts in the toolbar. I have little experience with such users; the ones I know and would call "computer illiterate" use the windows desktop or the Mac dock for starting their pet applications. If there's actually a considerable number of people who don't even get that far, I'm not sure how to help them. Maybe you are right, and hiding stuff is a possibility. Automatically moving the often-used entries to a well-visible toolbar is an alternative; I generally don't like if computers change their appearance based on what they perceive my usage patterns, but maybe it's the better choice here than hiding. Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
