Re: why kde and gnome's menu situation sucks
On Oct 23, Luke Seubert wrote:
> Really tall menus are bad UI.
>
> Deeply nested menus are bad UI.
>
> You can't have both, or either. As a result, tough choices must be made,
> which severely limits the number of items and submenus that can appear in
> the main menu.
>
> This is why I said that good menu UI design is tough.
>
> And this is why the default menu choices presented by Debian Desktop will
> invariably piss off some, maybe even many or most, traditional Debian
> developers and users. There is just no way to cut down the number of items
> in the menu that much so that a simple user interface is the result, without
> throwing out somebody's favorite program(s).
IIRC the deepest hierarchy possible in my current code is 4:
Education/Scientific/Something/Group. However, the odds of you having
enough Ed/Scientific/Something for Ed/Scientific/Something/Group to
not end up as Ed/Group or Ed/Scientific/Group are about zero.
(Something is "Astronomy" or "Physics" or a bunch of other things.)
And this assumes you have multiple menu entries for the group, another
rare possibility.
On the other hand, overload in one menu (like System or Accessories)
is distinctly possible. But that's why we can add additional
categories to break it down a bit.
Some expertise things could also be added to cull this further.
Another possibility: the alternatives system could be overloaded to
allow e.g. core entries for "wordprocessor.desktop", "email.desktop",
and "browser.desktop" (and others if deemed important) that would
depend in part on your installed packages and in part on their alt
priorities, kinda like the WinXP new-style start menu has a few major
app links in the core, with access to All Programs as a separate
option.
(Of course, that means we need a cool GUI to manage these and other
alternatives; I guess using debconf would be permissible in this case,
since the state you have to worry about is all simple, no comments or
anything to preserve.)
Chris
--
Chris Lawrence <cnlawren@phy.olemiss.edu> - http://www.lordsutch.com/chris/
Computer Systems Manager, Physics and Astronomy, Univ. of Mississippi
125B Lewis Hall - 662-915-5765
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