Hi guys, I'm new to this list, but I think this is probably the right place..
I'm a developer for the gEDA project, we write cross platform electronic CAD tools. The tools are GTK based, and as a personal preference, I run the GNOME desktop (because it's awesome ;)). With the last stable release cycle of our tools, we added menu and mime icons, although the lack of a suitable "Electronics" menu category was somewhat of a sticking point. We chose to plough ahead with a non XDG-spec compliant main category, and I wrote a small package which provides that menu, (and is now packaged as a dependency of our apps in a number of the major distributions). On specialised distributions, e.g. Fedora Electronics Lab, the Electronics menu actually gets rather full - there are tools for schematic editing, PCB layout, chip design layout, and it is difficult for the user to identify at a glance which are which in a large menu. Chitlesh Goorah (creator and maintainer of Fedora Electronics Lab), proposed that we should make the menu a tree, with sub-categories under Electronics. I didn't like that idea, instead subscribing to the "Shallow is good" view of the menu system. What I proposed to him instead, was that the menu ought to demark between sub-categories, something like this (just a mock-up): http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~pcjc2/geda/menus.png I started looking for somewhere to take this idea to the GNOME developers, and came across: http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/Menus It seems that the "Preferences" menu is another place where the menu become cluttered and difficult to navigate, partly due to a mass of capplets, and just partly because preferences covers such a wide area. I made a new mockup and put it on the above whiteboard page. I suppose I'd envisage this keying off the sub-categories listed in the .desktop file, although we may have to be more specific, and add the category text to be displayed in a similar manner to how the menus are defined currently. Another way to think of it would be an in-lined sub-menu. Comments and feedback on this idea would be warmly received, Best regards, -- Peter Clifton Electrical Engineering Division, Engineering Department, University of Cambridge, 9, JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FA Tel: +44 (0)7729 980173 - (No signal in the lab!) _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
