On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 14:04, Alan Horkan wrote:
First thing that immediately strikes me, the Inkscape menu. Please don't I dont have a top level menu named after the program, very few programs do this (Sodipodi being the only one I can think of immediately, some programs do replace the file menu with a Game menu or something else program specfic but generally developers) try to keep things as consistant as possible.
The rationale is that the items on the application (Inkscape) menu relate to Inkscape globally, as a whole. i.e. they operate on the "application" object rather than a "document" object as the File menu does. I've also had very positive experiences with this organization on Mac OS X.
That it's not GNOME HIG-compliant is a strike against it in my book too, but for the present I think the cost/benefit analysis comes out in its favor:
I'd add a Help menu, even if you only have the About dialog to put there.
1. That's part of the reason too -- I think having a Help menu, but no actual help is perhaps a bit cruel to the newbie.
2. Also, given we're somewhat tight for space on the menubar, I have a hard time justifying a menu if it's only going to have one or two items on it for the forseeable future.
The application menu isn't set in stone, and maybe as the menus evolve it'll eventually succumb to rule #2 itself.
But for now it seems better than adding another misleading and almost empty menu, then putting the remaining entries in the other menus which are heavily overburdened as it is.
(...you know your menus are too large when you're running at 1280x1024 and regularly get menu scroll arrows...)
-mental