Michael Catanzaro <[email protected]> writes:

[...]
>
> 3) There's significant inconsistency in menu elements. Half place About
> above Help, half below. Half say "About <program name>" and half leave
> out the program name.  Some new ones don't even have Quit -- I'm looking
> at GNOME Terminal and Evince here.  Evince's in particular is a complete
> mess: it has ONLY "Help," -- About in its gear menu instead, as is
> "Close."

The reason why About is not in the global menu is because the action is
associated to a particular window, since it's a modal dialog attached to
a window. That's not a global option in my opinion, even though I agree
the concept of about dialog is indeed global because its contents is
common for all windows. When you have multiple evince windows open
(which is a common situation) selecting About in the global menu makes
one of the windows (it might look even random when using focus follows
mouse) shows the dialog attached to it. Help is different, because yelp
is launched independently of the evince windows. So, we either leave the
about in the window menu (it's a modal dialog of the window) or we make
the about dialog actually global and not modal. I understand that in
apps like Epiphany where you typically have a single or main  window
with multiple tabs, and usually maximized or large, having the about in
the global menu and attached to the *main* window makes sense and looks
good. But I don't think this is the case of Evince.

> I think Evince doesn't want to have a way of closing all
> windows at once, and maybe that's what's up with Terminal as well.

Yes, that's the Evince case, I don't know about terminal, though.

> Perhaps apps with multiple windows should define Quit to close only
> related windows, instead of all of them.

What's the related window? the last focused one? this is very confusing,
just use the window menu for window related actions.

> Can we agree that
> Help/About/Quit should be required in the app menu?

I disagree. I think consistency is very important, but not all apps are
used the same way, so it's not easy to find a global solution. I think
there are groups of apps, for example, the apps that only have a window,
or have the concept of main window, apps that typically run maximized,
apps with multiple windows independent to each other, etc. These groups
of apps should be consistent, but we can't expect that Quit means the
same in all apps, for example.

> Quit is the one
> thing that used to be guaranteed to be there, even for third-party apps,
> and I don't think users should ever have any question as to where it is.
>

Regards, 
-- 
Carlos Garcia Campos
PGP key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x523E6462

Attachment: pgpo_TYK1l8Z4.pgp
Description: PGP signature

_______________________________________________
desktop-devel-list mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list

Reply via email to