Re: [Ayatana] The Future of Window Borders, Menu Bars, and More

On 08/07/2010 08:46 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

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Ryan Peters wrote on 06/08/10 17:15:

On 08/06/2010 06:17 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
...

What sense does it make to have a menu that's labelled "Calculator"
when doing a calculation, "Banshee" when you're playing music, and
"Empathy" when you're chatting with friends -- but "Firefox" when
you're writing e-mail, "Firefox" when you're buying books, "Firefox"
when you're reading the news, "Firefox" when you're playing Farmville,
"Firefox" when you're posting on a Web forum, and "Firefox" when
you're watching Hulu? Not much sense at all.

It lets people see what application window they have open more clearly

Sorry, I guess I didn't make my point clearly enough. Let me try again.

In this scenario someone is using (for example) Calculator, Banshee,
Empathy, Gmail, Amazon, CNN, Farmville, the Gundam AnimeSuki Forum, and
Hulu respectively. That they are using Firefox for 70% of these things
does not mean it is useful or informative for "Firefox" to appear in the
corner of the screen while doing them -- just as, for example, "Gnome"
or "Xorg" or "Ubuntu" or "GNU" or "Linux" shouldn't. Taking up that much
screen space with any of those brands may well be good for their
vendors, but it is not relevant to user goals.

Of course it's relevant. People know they're in a web browser
(whatever they'd call it, most likely "The Internet" or "The
Fox-thing"). because they can go to different websites in it. They
know that they use only one application to do so. If they
want options relevant to the application, they open the Application
menu. Shoving it in a menu with other window-specific options would
be unorganized and confusing (It isn't to you or me because we're
used to it. Think of the new users or people like my mom, for
example). After they figure out that GNOME has application-specific
things in an application-specific place, they pick it up quickly and
remember that. Unlike other menus that are structured differently
for every application, the contents of the application menu are
almost always the same. It makes more sense for "Preferences" to go
under the "Application" menu than a "Tools" or "Edit" menu, doesn't
it?

than looking for clues such as a super-tiny icon

In Ubuntu 9.10 and later, the application icon does not appear in the
window title bar, partly for the same reason (it's not relevant to user
goals).

In Ubuntu 9.10 are the key words. I use vanilla GNOME on Arch
Linux, as well as other distributions. Not everybody uses Ubuntu,
even if it's the most well-known distribution. This discussion isn't
only located on the ayatana list. That said, the application icon
isn't in mutter either, nor the window menu button. Putting the
application icon up there on the Application menu makes it more
obvious what window you have open and that the menu is relevant to
the application, so people know to click there and see what it
contains.

or the window title,
which sometimes does not say the name of the application (like this
Thunderbird window, which says "Write: Re: [Usability] [Ayatana] The
Future of Window Borders, Menu Bars,-" (it cuts off there) or if the
screen is in direct sunlight. I know this is a Thunderbird window
because I opened it with Thunderbird and I'm used to this behavior,
but what about people with mental or visual disabilities/deficiencies,
or people that aren't used to how E-mail clients work? They shouldn't
be excluded; GNOME is just as much for me as it is somebody that wasn't
made the same way as I was or somebody that isn't used to GNOME, and
I'd hate to leave them out.

People know what a web browser is.

By far, most of them do not.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEt0N3xu0Do>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH5ZIXItkS8>

The term "web browser" maybe, but they know that they have to open
something to get on Facebook or Farmville or whatever. The
Application Menu helps them know the name of it, which is Firefox or
Opera or Chromium or another browser. It reduces confusion so people
can be sure what window they have open.

The menu doesn't control
the page, but rather the application that renders a page. For
OpenOffice.org, the menu wouldn't say "editing my resume" or "designing
a website" or "putting numbers of some sort into a table", would it?
No, because that's things that people use OOo for and they know that
it's all the same program; same with Firefox.

If you have a document open in Microsoft Word and a spreadsheet open in
Microsoft Excel, and you choose "Quit" from Excel's application menu on
the Mac (or "Exit" from its Office button on Windows), the spreadsheet
will close. But if you had the same document open in OpenOffice.org
Writer, and the same spreadsheet open in OpenOffice.org Calc, and you
chose "Quit" from OpenOffice.org's app menu in Gnome Shell, the
spreadsheet would close, and -- surprise! -- the document would close too.

Why? Because Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel happen to be coded as
separate applications, but OpenOffice.org Writer and OpenOffice.org
Calc happen to be coded as a single application. Given how far off you
were in thinking people knew what a Web browser was, please excuse me
for not taking your word for it when you claim that people "know that
[OpenOffice.org] is all the same program".

The app menu does not introduce this problem, but it does perpetuate it
and enshrine it. And "Quit" is given as the first example of an item
justifying the menu's existence at all.

Bad example. The window still has a close document option (and if it
isn't labeled as such it's a bug in the application itself, not
GNOME). People will learn that the application menu quits everything
(which is just as easy to learn how to use Windows or Mac, if not
easier), and it is a very useful function to have. Might I note that
GNOME Shell and OpenOffice.org are by no means "complete" and are
open for bug reports. Reporting this to both would be a logical step
to take.

...

In our user testing of Rhythmbox (results to be published real soon
now), one consistent result was that no-one understood the distinction
between "Close" and "Quit". In other words, they didn't distinguish
between the window and the application.

Then I'd assume that GNOME Shell would help them understand the
distinction even better because it makes a larger difference now.

...

And "Check For Updates" is, in Ubuntu and other Gnome-based OSes,
the job of the OS rather than the application.

Not quite. GNOME has no "official" package manager. Fedora, Debian,
Ubuntu, Arch and so on, do. GNOME by itself exists without a package
manager, and there are quite a few people that don't use package
managers. While it is less organized, and package managers are why so
many people love using Linux, a Check for Updates option (which is
built into every version of Firefox) would make sense if it isn't
disabled (and most package maintainers ship Firefox with this option
disabled because of package managers).

What? The point is that "Check for Updates" is being used, on the page
describing the application menu, as an example of something that would
appear in it. But for the vast majority of Gnome users it should not be
in *any* menu, so it is not a valid example.

For the vast majority of GNOME users. Not every GNOME user
uses a package manager. Not every GNOME user, even if they do use a
package manager, uses Firefox with their package manager. If
it's provided by a package manager, the option for checking for
updates is disabled, as I said. If it isn't disabled, it would
appear in the menu. It's almost never disabled unless you run

...

Or to put it another way: The Gnome Shell application menu mimicks the
Mac OS X application menu almost exactly. It may seem "shiny" or
"familiar" to those designers who use a Mac, but it is obsolete today
and ignores the historical context that led Apple to introduce it in
the first place.

Have you even /looked/ at the page detailing the menu
<http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/AppMenu> ,

Yes, that's why I'm writing.

or even
/tried/ the work-in-progress menu? It doesn't mimic the menu. In fact
there are /several/ differences. Mainly, Mac's menu bar has every
single menu bar option, while GNOME's only has those relevant to the
application

That's not relevant. We were discussing the app menu, not the menu bar
as a whole.

to reduce confusion among new users and making the desktop
seem more integrated and organized.

Those are new claims that you're making without evidence.

Apparently you don't have problems finding things if your vision is
cluttered with objects. I do. I like to have as little visual
clutter as possible because the interface seems cleaner and it's
easier to find what I'm looking for. Shell does this perfectly in my
opinion, and compared to something like Ubuntu where all of the
icons are shoved close together in one corner of the screen, it's a
God-send (whose idea was it anyway to put icons for drastically
different things all in one corner of the screen?).

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