Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-gnome (56 mails)

[Christian Jäger <christian.jaeger@xxxxxx>]

Hello Alberto,

thank you taking an interest! I love the idea behind the menu and hence
love thinking about making it even more foolproof.

Am Sonntag, den 06.05.2007, 03:38 +0200 schrieb Alberto Passalacqua:

> So the lock screen command is a fast shortcut which eliminates the need
> to add the "lock screen" applet to the panel :-)

True. Though this is rather a rare use-case. But you could argue in a similar way
that one needs a button for 'workspaces' in the menu. 

That reminds me, there was a wonderfully insightful blog-entry about how choice
can bring upon confusion and thus void choice (not completely
unrelated):
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html


> > So put the 'install software'-button next to
> > the 'More...'-button in the menu/the app-browser, where the user will
> > need it.
> 
> Hmm. Maybe it's functional (I'm not convinced) but it looks terrible.

What would you say; would it look good if was placed like an
application-button? Here's a new go at the menu:

Mockup:
http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/3136/cleangnomemainmenumockudg0.png


> Moreover I would love to see that More... disappear and be replaced by
> an arrow which opens the full menu (XP style, to be clear) and not the
> application browser.

It would be kind of a break of consistency to introduce a pop-up menu
but I see that it would be practical. But couldn't you try to keep it
flat and not collapsing? Especially older people tend to get easily
frustrated when they move the cursor a little and sub-menus disappear
again.

How about this - you could either make the menu behave like its
KDE-counterpart and scroll column by column:

Mockups: 

App-browser:
http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/9922/appbrowsermockup2lj4.png
App-browser scrolling:
http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/129/appbrowsermockup2scrollvb0.png


Or you could let it extend horizontally like this:

Mockup:
http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/6345/appbrowsermockup2extendsc1.png


> I feel that splitting the menu vertically in two parts make it cleaner.
> But it's probably just a question of habits.
> 
I only opted for the vertical separation because horizontally 
splitting we end up with much more 'dead space'.
 

> System info in the third mockup are definetly too small to be read! 

Yes; I would imagine a simple status-bar would do for the disk-space and
a simple symbol for on-/offline? Enough to almost subconsciously realize
that everything's in working order (or not)?

Greets,
Chris



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