Linux Format magazine June 2006 (LXF80) reported on comments Nat Friedman[1] made in Paris: ... we developed an extension to Gnome that put a bar at the top, which looked a little like Macintosh. In our usability tests that we did last year we discovered that the bar was a really bad idea. It was confusing to Windows users who were used to having just one bar at the bottom, and confusing to Macintosh users who ere used to having one bar at the top and it behaving completely differently. So we'd written this thing that was confusing to everyone, and hundreds of [usability test] videos later we said, "Let's not do that!"
[Text quoted as directly and accurately as possible from Linux format magazine.] Neither Sun Microsystems nor Novell use the top bar. They have not yet attempted to push these changes back upstream. This is especially worrying since it was Ximian (now part of Novell) who proposed the topbar in the first place. It seems odd to carry on with this strategy when the very people who proposed it are now saying it is a bad idea. On a personal note, as someone who has been using Gnome since around 1.2 and various version of Microsoft before that so I happen to be more comfortable without the topbar. (If at some later date the GTK port to Mac OS allowed a truely Macintosh style menubar I'd be interested to try it having also used Macs in education.) If I feel bothered enough to change any of the defaults (rather than file a report trying to improve the defaults) the first thing I usually change is to put down a custom wallpaper and second to that is to use have a main menu on the bottom left corner. Okay so we have Novell and Sun in one corner using a more Microsoft style layout. In the other corner we have Ubuntu and others [2] who (mostly) accept the current default layout. Do we need to reconsider? After we have discussed this I may bring this to the desktop-devel list but deliberately did not crosspost since I wanted to avoid crosstalk as it gets too disorganised and confusing and often ends up being counter productive. Sincerely Alan Horkan Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ [1] I've sent a Carbon Copy of this message to Nat as you can see from the headers. [2] I don't know for sure what other distributions accept the default layout. Please do tell if your preferred distribution accepts the default panel layout. _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
