Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 17th May 2007 18:54 UTC
In the GNOME bugzilla, there is an ongoing discussion about whether or not to include a patch into the default GNOME installation which would enable GNOME to (optionally) have a global application menubar, similar to that of the Mac OS and KDE (in the latter it is optional and off by default). Installation instructions and .deb packages, as well as a 60-page (and counting) discussion of the patch, are available on the UbuntuForums. Read on for a poll on this issue.
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Member since:
2005-11-16
I think this is spot on. I know plenty of people with large monitors, and on my main workstation PC I use a 26" display with a 22" secondary display. At work quite a few people working on CAD or database design have dual 24" displays, while other staff have one or two 19" or 20" displays.
Observing the way they fill those screens, I can see that the location of windows (and crucially the menubar at the top of them) hasn't changed that much since the days when 800x600 was an impressive resolution.
Whatever application is being used, I never see windows resized into the bottom corner of the screen, where the menubar would be a long distance from the top edge. Probably 95% of the time people still have a single maximised application window on screen, with only a titlebar's width separating the menu location from that of a single menubar (of course that's plenty to destroy the Fitts' law advantage).
A larger monitor means that people view full A4 pages in a word processor or a DTP app, maybe two pages side by side on a widescreen. It means they keep a much larger section of spreadsheet on screen. Or view a whole photo without zooming out so much. In my experience it doesn't mean that they're ever likely to tile windows vertically on the screen, placing the menubar in the middle. Even if they did, I doubt the increased distance would outweigh the accuracy and speed offered by a control on the screen edge.
I certainly still maximise windows a lot of the time, especially when using MDI apps that make life difficult if used any other way.
If anything I think a single menubar might have more of an advantage on a larger screen. Quickly hitting a small target is even more difficult when the distance is larger, especially when using faster mouse acceleration to compensate for that distance. With the pointer stopping when it hits the menu, you can throw the pointer to the top of the screen as fast as you like and you can't overshoot it.
Overall I think the argument that larger screen sizes invalidate the benefits of a single menubar is totally spurious, it just doesn't hold up to real world interface usage.