On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 9:18 AM, Peter Clifton <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Sat, 2008-12-27 at 09:29 +1930, Dokuro wrote:
> > > 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<http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/%7Epcjc2/geda/menus.png>
> > >
> > > --
> > > Peter Clifton
> >
> > It's a nice idea, but I feel that it increases a lot the amount of
> > space needed by the menus, they are already too big for 15" screens
> > (mostly on the preferences menu since it has more items) on your
> > electronic menu it works fine, i could even see it working nicely on
> > the music menu (recording, editing, video, music, etc) but it might
> > grow to take a lot of screen space.
>
I think we could tackle that problem simply by merging more preference
dialogs together.

Off the top of my head, the following preferences could go together:
- Keyboard and Keyboard Shortcuts
- Network configuration and Network proxy
- Appearance, Screen resolution, Screensaver, and Windows
- Personal File Sharing (gnome-user-share) and Remote Desktop

If you also look at the Administration menus then there are even more
possible merges.

>
> That is of course a problem.
>
> I was going to suggest that "too big for 15" screens" was less of an
> issue, than the actual resolution in pixels - but this depends on
> whether the font and menu sizes are being scaled with the screen's
> _physical_ DPI. I can't recall if that is the case or not.
>
> Since people wanted to reduce the number of items in the preferences
> menu, so if that were done - perhaps a few categories might have a
> place. Dividing the long list into a few pieces IMO makes it more
> navigable than one big long list without the space occupied by the
> headings.
>
> The XDG menu spec does have some adjustments to control how many items
> are inlined before they get their own sub-menu. For menus (e.g.
> "Electronics", or "Sound & Video"), I wonder if a different heuristic
> would be useful.. you don't want to inline a heading for categories
> which have just one item in them. You'd probably want to group such
> icons into a virtual "Other" category.
>
> Of course, we'd only show inlined headers if there are more than one in
> a given menu.
>
> The rules do become reasonably complex quite quickly, but I figured it
> might work more easily for the preferences menu where the platform ships
> most of its contents.
>
>
> --
> 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!)
>
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-Natan
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