-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Luke Benstead wrote on 01/11/10 13:40: >... > When they were implemented in UNE we had a great blog post by MPT about > the reasoning: http://design.canonical.com/2010/05/menu-bar/ > > It made sense. Netbooks have limited vertical space, UNE focuses one > window at a time, global menus are a perfect fit. > > At the same time Mark posted on his blog > (http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/359) with the following > quote: > > "There are outstanding questions about the usability of a panel-hosted > menu on much larger screens, where the window and the menu could be > very far apart. Those questions are greatly diminished in the netbook > environment, by definition."
So, what's relevantly different for notebook and desktop computers, compared to netbook computers? Two things: they have a larger screen, and they're more powerful. That larger screen slows down the action of travelling to a menu. But it doesn't slow that action down five-fold. It doesn't slow it down nearly as much as putting menus inside the window would. The greater power means you're more likely to be running multiple programs, which makes a global menu bar both more and less compelling than on a netbook. It's less compelling in that you're more likely to have to click in a window before using its menus. It's more compelling in that it avoids the problem Microsoft discovered where people were confusing menus from background windows with menus in the active window. >... > Perhaps we could start removing menus, and specifying a standard, > consistent way to do so (e.g. like Chrome). I don't know why you call it standard and consistent. Have you even seen Chrome's Edit menu "item"? :-) > Perhaps the menus should > appear in the huge space we've opened up to the right of the title bar. > Perhaps there is another way to go, or perhaps we already have an > optimal setup. We won't know without doing usability testing and making > sure we aren't making a mistake. > > Instead, we appear to be plagiarizing Apple's menubar just because we > can. That's incorrect. There are many Apple things that we can do but we won't, because they're silly. Application menus, for example, or sheets. > On top of that it currently won't be consistent as not all the > common UI toolkits support it. >... One important task for Natty is to get Firefox and Thunderbird using native menus. Another is to get OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice using native menus. - -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkzQamsACgkQ6PUxNfU6ecqPQACgl06xoAnwm0dqnlpahOc7tGIp GTEAoMPirpVVk5FVGzqZnHa/D+1cG7OW =DVz3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
