Ideas for a new main menu

As promised, I’ll write a little more on menus. I’ll include some pictures too, to ensure this gets looked at. If you haven’t tried Gimmie yet, I recommend you do - it works well and proposes some good ideas. However, I found myself missing some of the niceties of the GNOME panel so I set about turning Gimmie into a panel applet, initially retaining its topic windows before deciding to attach them to the applet as menus like so:

This version shared a problem with the original Gimmie bar in that menus/items become moving targets when items are added or removed. So I pushed all the menus together to produce something that resembles the standard GNOME menu bar:

The above is what I have been using for the past few months and the associated code is being massaged upstream - I say massaged as it is a mess of inherited and overridden classes. But it works pretty well.

In the traditional menu model, items are organised in a nested hierarchy. This does not work well when:

1. the hierarchy is too deep;
2. has too many items at each level or
3. the menu is not organised in a way the user understands or expects.

For Gimmie, the basic model is that an area is populated with items when a topic or category is selected or text is entered in the search field. The user can then select the desired item from the list. Having the one area solves issue (1) and adding search mitigates (2) and (3). Note that most modern desktops are moving this way (see SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop or Windows Vista’s menu, for example).

There is already a part of the GNOME desktop that uses this behaviour and seems to have a fair bit of overlap with Gimmie though mostly just dealing with search: Deskbar. If you have a look at most of the Deskbar handlers (right-click on the applet > Preferences) you’ll notice that many of them fit nicely into the Gimmie topics. So why not integrate the two?

Using the excellent Inkscape, I’ve made a mockup of what this might look like:

The toggle buttons on the left-hand side are the topics. Below them are Help and Quit - two important actions that should be prominent. On the right-hand side is the item area showing the contents of the selected topic organised into categories with an associated toolbar up the top. There are pins to the right of each item that when pressed cause a quick access launcher to be placed next to the menu button (note example of Text Editor). There could perhaps be a ‘Pinned’ category placed at the top of each topic. Down the bottom is the search/action bar. Since the mockup does not show what the menu would look like for each topic, I’ll list some possibilities each topic with its categories and toolbar items:

Recent

• Applications
• Documents
• People
• Places
• Settings
• Popular web sites? (frequently and recently used)

Applications

• Toolbar: add/remove/update…
• Accessories
• Games
• Graphics
• Internet
• Office
• Programming
• Sound & Video
• System Tools

Documents

• Toolbar: new… (this could also be a category containing a list of templates)
• Email (important only? should this be part of People or both?)
• Notes (Gimmie already works well with Tomboy - thanks Alex!)
• Photos (photo sets?)
• Downloads/Attachments

People (sort by status by default; organised into user-specified groups)

• Toolbar: user’s status (drop down menu), new person/group

Places

• Folders (including bookmarks and Trash)
• Attached to this computer (Devices/Media, Printers - these could be separate)
• On other computers (Network)

Settings

• Preferences
• Administration

OR

• Hardware
• Look & Feel
• Personal
• System

Help…

Quit…

[ Search/Actions ] bar - items to search:

• currently selected topic first
• any of the above (apps, files, contacts etc)
• web bookmarks/history/addresses/searches
• dictionary
• calculator
• help?

Each toolbar could have a ’sort by’ drop-down menu (including: Alphabetical, Recent, Popularity) and a ‘zoom’ drop-down like current Gimmie (Today, Last 3 days, Last week etc).

I’m trying this out as a single menu but perhaps each topic could have its own menu and associated search/action bar (Quit and Settings would be rolled into a Computer or System topic much like the current Gimmie).

Pros of a single menu:

• Less hunting through menus to find an item
• One place to search from

Cons of a single menu:

• Cluttered?
• Is contextual search easier/better?

Clicking in the search/action entry could replace the items area with help/tips on search and actions, eg:

“Start typing below to search or perform actions, such as:

• Search for documents by its title or contents
• The name of a program
• Look up a word in the dictionary
• Solve arithmetic, eg: (42-13)*7
• Perform web searches or search through bookmarks and history”

Deskbar already has nice built-in touches like the grouping of results and the chosen item hanging around for a few moments as feedback.

Where this could really get interesting is in the extensibility. Deskbar already has this covered with its handlers (or plugins or extensions, if you like) but consider how each topic could be a handler or perhaps a handler could extend a topic:

• The Applications topic could be removed in favour of a documents-based approach with Open (existing documents/places) and Create (for new works) menus
• Projects could become a first-class object - perhaps with workspace integration
• The Recent topic could be a calendar view

Basically this could be a flexible menu creation framework with sensible defaults. Thoughts?