Menu Policy - please read if you maintain a package with a .desktop file in it!

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Fri, 14 May 2004 10:09:39 -0400, Colin Walters <walters at redhat.com> wrote:
> Again, I don't think most users are going to want to spend time
> evaluating various applications.

Don't want to...sure they dont want to. But the fact remains that
default applications that are being decided apun can be considered
at best a compromise. No one can say with authority that ALL defaults
being chosen are the best for 90% of people out there. Too many tastes
and too many apps for the 90% rule to work for all the defaults.

Most people will be fine with most defaults. Exactly 3 users in the
userbase will be completely happy with ALL the default chosen apps.
I full expect most people to feel that at least one chosen default
application is ill fitting for their needs and will go looking for an
alternative. Making it easy to find those few personalized alternative
and to incorporate those personalized choices into the establish UI
for calling apps is good design. Now... this does not require full
menu editting and control. But there must be a way...a sensible way to
promote prefered applications into the menus.

> 
> If they have a preferred application, they're more of a power user.

I don't know if I'd go that far... I would say they have been
corrupted by a power user, who got them hooked on an application. I
wouldn't call my wife a power user, but she likes galeon a lot. Its my
fault for showing to her, and now i have to make sure its on her
system or there is hell to pay.

> Probably something like the MacOS "Applications" folder would be a 
> good solution here, as Rex suggested.

UI clutter is what that is. Do we really want another way to access
applications from the gui? The fact that in mac the applictions
folders served a sort of packaging purpose as well, and mac had the
idea of the recent applictions idea, the applictions folders was a
piece of a thought out puzzle and served more than a single purpose of
keeping menus uncluttered.

I dont think implementing the Applications folder in the gnome/kde ui
makes a lot of sense since it would be solely used to push things out
of the menu and there is no corresponding recent applictions concept
to have the menu ui learn your usage habits.  If you are going to push
all the 'other' applictions besides the default into a folder view in
the file manager, you will have to have a way for the menu to learn
from that user's usage of the application folder, so the menu will
populate preferred or commonly used apps based on user habits.

The real fix to this issue is getting the menus to learn user habits. Either
get menu editting working so users can codify what they want directly
or build in some logic so that the menu structure learns from the
users habits.
Power users are going to want full control of the menus, and I would
assume that novice users would appreciate auto-population of the menus
based on application usage.

-jef