Please check the status of this specification in Launchpad before editing it. If it is Approved, contact the Assignee or another knowledgeable person before making changes.
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The administration and preferences menus have been replaced by the control-center panel.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?