Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 13th Feb 2009 23:15 UTC
A very, very long time ago I personally advocated the inclusion of a certain feature into GNOME. We set up a poll at OSNews, which resulted in a very, very resounding "yes!" from the OSNews community - many of which are GNOME users. The feature in question was the global application menubar, which allowed the GNOME desktop to have a menu bar atop the screen similar to that of Mac OS X. The poll is long gone, the debate thread in the Bugzilla has died out, and no decision has yet been made. I wanted to know where this feature stands, and how much the developers have improved it, and I was in for a surprise.
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RE[3]: The sound of laughter
by macman on Sat 14th Feb 2009 17:25
in reply to "RE[2]: The sound of laughter"
Member since:2006-11-19
Thats exactly what GNUStep does:
http://www.gnustep.org/experience/images/Gorm-Example1.jpg
which is pretty nice also.
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Member since:
2006-09-01
The universal menu bar made sense in 1986 when most applications would be command line programs running windowed, but in 2009 it's makes less sense since most applications are written for the abstractions a GUI. It answers the question, "How do we add GUI functionality to command line programs running in a windows?" Add a universal menu bar with copy, paste, quit, etc. Basically, applications in 2009 take advantage of the abstractions the GUI provides, and the universal menu bar is a relic from a time when applications didn't.
On small screens, I agree that a menu bar makes sense, but at the same time it's still taking up screen real estate. The better idea would be to hide the menu bar under one icon or menu, and have a few shortcut icons. Since the menu bar is designed to hold rarely used items anyway, it becomes a rarely used item itself, and reducing the bar down to a single interface item would tidy the GUI up nicely. Microsoft is going this direction with it's Ribbon interface, and there is the Tiny menu extension for Firefox to enable the functionality.
http://www.componentone.com/newimages/Products/ScreenShots/StudioWi...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1455
A good compromise might be a combination be having multiple document windows with a menu/toolbar that can float or be pinned. Mainly a slimmed down version of the Dreamweaver/Photoshop/Gimp floating windows concept. This could solve the problem of toolbars and menu bars taking up screen space, and it would open up the possibility of having the menu/toolbar jump to where the mouse is after a key press then return to a home location.
Quick and ugly mockup of the idea:
http://i40.tinypic.com/2mgqrza.jpg