[haiku-development] Re: Handling Application Preferences and About in a common way

  • From: pulkomandy <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2012 09:39:38 +0100

On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 12:05:58AM +0000, David Given wrote:
> As such I would suggest having that first menu called 'File' --- yes, I
> know it makes absolutely no sense abstraction-wise, but people still
> instinctively look for it, even in an application which doesn't use
> files. An application without File looks weird and alien.
> 
> (And, yes, the second menu should be 'Edit'.)

This is how Windows does it. On Mac OS X both are in a menu that has the
same name as the application. There it makes sense, because the menubar
is application-global. Under Linux (or at least Gnome), the preferences
item seems to go in Tools > Options most of the time.

Having a File menu in an application that manages no files is nonsense.
Very few applications in Haiku does that. Terminal has a Terminal menu,
Vision has an "icon" menu. Tracker for example has a File menu, with
options to manage files. Also, some applications (Caya, DeskCalc, fRiSS)
have no menubar at all. The File/Edit system works well for document
windows, but still, it is not application-global. File > Close should
close only the current document, not the whole application. To me,
closing the application is disturbing : I did an action in a single
window, the effect should be contained to that window. If I want to quit
the whole application, I'd look in the deskbar entry for it (which has a
"close all" button).

The current situation is a bit different. This comes from the fact that
a lot of apps are either :
 * Mac OS inspired: there the menubar is global, so it makes sense to
have actions for the whole application in.
 * Windows inspired : there the interface uses MDI (Multiple Document in
one window) paradigm, where the window IS the application and it has
subwindows for documents. Again, the menubar is application-global.

In Haiku, each Window is a Document (we even have a B_DOCUMENT_WINDOW
look constant for that). A tracker window is a folder, an Icon-O-Matic
window is an icon, a BePDF window is a PDF file, a MediaPlayer window is
a media file, etc. There are some exceptions : Terminal is not
document-centered for example, unless you consider a bash session as a
document. Web+ allows tabs, but from the very beginning of it I heard
plans of opening windows and stacking them with Stack&Tile (I did that
for Netsurf and I think it works very well).

Now, we can see that the apps that have an application menu (Terminal
and Vision) are not document-centered apps.


One last point as for the dekbar menu not being discoverable enough : as
far as I know, people get more and more used to managing windows from
Mac OS X dock or from Windows 7 taskbar which works very similar. So,
this menu seems to be the usual way of doing things. Ubuntu switched to
a dock-like system as well. So, it seems to me if we want to go with the
mass, maybe we should look at the current version of what they do, not
the 10 year old one.

-- 
Adrien.

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