MenuItemsRevisited

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  • Launchpad Entry: menu-items-revisited

  • Packages affected: gnome-menus, gnome-panel, applications with a menu item

Summary

The current menu simplification is not ideal. We mask some items which confuses the users who want to use them. This specification is describes the changes we are going to do for gutsy

Release Note

The administration and preferences menus have been replaced by the control-center panel. All the standard applications are now listed in the corresponding menu.

Rationale

The current way of masking menu items doesn't bring a lot of simplication and confuse users who want to use them

Use Cases

  • Mathias wants to use the OpenOffice.org drawing application, there is an item present in the "applications, office" menu which makes it easy to run it without having to start first openoffice and they to figure how to open this component

Implementation

We will drop the patches to mask menu items and evaluate using the control-center shell to replace the administration and preferences menus.

Test/Demo Plan

Open the menus and verify you can find items to start all the applications installed you find useful for a standard desktop user

BoF agenda and discussion

Layers of visibility

have multiple "layers of visibility"

  • order the menu with priorities (could be done by using X-Ubuntu-High-Priority, etc. categories)
  • could it be done by group priorities?

That would require to patch all the package shipping a .desktop which would mean lot of changes over upstream and Debian. A such change would be better done upstream

New items are not easily findable

Highlighting new menu items (after package installation):

  • the menu items in the applications menu could blink (like the window list when a window requires attention)
  • needs work in the panel
  • notification sent by a hook after the installation of the package?


CategorySpec

MenuItemsRevisited (last edited 2008-08-06 16:41:09 by localhost)