On 6 Apr 2006, at 23:53, Glynn Foster wrote: > I'm still not a fan of our JDS 3.1 layout, and much prefer the > community > version where they've rolled the Applications menu into the top level > - > it feels infinitely more useful and more consistent across the > desktop.
Yep, I prefer it too, but all the other feedback so far has been to stick with the JDS 3 version. (And I do think the community version would look pretty intimidating with our 'quick launch' bit stuck on top, which again, people have been very keen to retain.) > Your proposal doesn't mention anything about how the menubar applet > changes, or how nautilus Go menu might change. Not yet, still working on that bit... although we didn't bother changing the menubar applet in previous JDS versions, so it was always out of sync, but nobody ever complained AFAIK. So that's probably not a high priority. > Generally, I don't really like the churn we're imposing from the GNOME > default - unless there are really good reasons to do so. Well, a couple of reasons are (a) continuity between releases for our existing users, and (b) shorter menus are generally easier to navigate, provided they don't end up going to deep instead, and we're four menu items shorter at the top level than the community equivalent would be. (And we have actually managed to reduce the maximum depth somewhat from JDS3 at the same time). I don't dispute that there are counter-arguments too, however... > It's more > patches, more localizations, and consequently more cost [1] - and yes, > more pain because I'm tasked with doing a lot of these changes ;) I'm supposed to be doing some of them as well this time :) It's true we seem to be getting pulled a bit in two directions these days though... not so long ago it was the "minimize the number of patches we maintain" edict, but more recently it's all "we can do better for our users than the generic community version" again. What's a man to do...? > o Choosing an application, I have to go through 3 sets of menus, as > against the communities 2. I'd personally prefer having to go > through more pain for preferences that you're less likely to need > on a daily basis. It would certainly be interesting to find out how often people actually need to launch applications from the depths of the Applications menu. (I know I have 99% of what I need saved in my session and open all the time, and launch the rest from a terminal or the Run Applications dialog-- and there's always the quick launch menu, panel launchers and custom keyboard shortcuts for anything else you need to manually start up regularly. Certainly in the past I wouldn't have qualified as a typical JDS user, but now that our user focus is shifting, that's probably not quite so true any more...) > o The [username] submenu is really going to look out of place. Well, it's basically just the community Places menu of course, so we could just go back to calling it Places again. I wouldn't have any objection to that personally. > I'm not even sure I like the 'Logout gman...' anymore. Perhaps we > could do something like adding the about-me icon and username to > the menu stripe to indicate who's session this currently is like > XP. Yep, that could work, although side-on writing is never pretty :) > o Preferences menu is pretty large. I think we could remove things > like gconf-editor and sessions at the very least. As noted in the comments, it's unlikely (I hope) that we'll actually ship it quite like that. Depending on the how John's single sysadmin work goes, we'll probably either try to amalgamate a bunch of the capplets (in conjunction with the community), or just have the Preferences menu item open a control center shell, rather than being a whopping submenu. > o I don't think we should include at-poke in the menus Hmm, why not, how is it any different from other development tools? (Which admittedly aren't in there yet-- I'm still waiting on the list that we want to include.) > o I think we plan to EOL the games, no? First I've heard of it... > o Save Screenshot/Take Screenshot - is the string change *really* > that crucial? No, but it matches the title of the dialog that appears when you select it, which is needlessly different at the moment. Would want to try and get this change back to the community, certainly (as we would with almost all of the proposed tooltip changes, probably-- most of the current community ones are dire). > o I really hate the Staroffice 8 menu items. Well, I'm sure you remember the last time we had that conversation with the StarOffice team :) I'd be happy to suggest something else, but they've always insisted on having "StarOffice <n>" in all their menu items before, so it didn't seem worth the effort this time. > o I wonder if 'System Tools' should match 'Administration'? Yeah, I still find it hard to know where to draw the line between those two. I don't really want to just merge the two menus though as we'd end up with another monster menu, with fewer options for shortening it than we have with Preferences... best I can think of would be to have a Preferences submenu (or control-center-opening command) in the Admin menu, but then we're getting into the realms of deeper menus again. Hopefully we'll get some useful feedback on the distinction or lack thereof when people start using it in anger, and adjust things accordingly. > [1] And yet more delta between other GNOME vendors out there - Red > Hat, > Ubuntu, Novell, Nexenta, etc.. Well, they're customising their menus to some extent as well, albeit not as much as we're proposing. (E.g. off the top of my head, Ubuntu has a "System" menu instead of "Desktop", and "Go" instead of "Places" in Nautilus... or do we just have Places instead of Go?) Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:calum.benson at sun.com Java Desktop System Team http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems
