Panel menu structure changes

Hi Eugenia,

First off: Be nice.

Then, run 'killall gnome-panel'. The About and Help menu items have changed
location, so they should not be displayed in the Computer menu once you restart
the panel. WartyWarthog is still pre-Final, so you can expect things like this
to happen.

Regarding your patch comment - we are not complete muppets. :-)

But I don't like these icons there! I have added my own menus, and having
the Ubuntu/Help/Home icons there they bloat my desktop! How do I take them
out? The applications:// do not show these icons there, so I can't delete
them via a gui!

I really-really don't like there in their new location.

Items on a menu don't "bloat" your desktop. :-)

Until menu editing is improved (and perhaps not even then), those items will
stay there. They are not normal application icons.

>Items on a menu don't "bloat" your desktop. :-)

Yes, but they are bloating the menus, and when you only work with menus,
you are ending up with the same result. When a menu has more than 12 menu
items, it is bad usability. The human brain can't go fast enough and scan
them immediately, instead it falls back to having to think and having to
read all of them, again and again. Ask Havoc too about this if you don't
believe me (in fact, the max number of 12 is his opinion).

Now, the thing is, when you install apps from your repositories, some apps
are recreating the "Other" and "Programming" menus that are not normally
found on the default ubuntu. Now, add the new icons you added there
yesterday, and you are ending up with way too many menu items.

It's just too much. Move them back to the Computer menu, and create a NEW
menu for files. You see, computer operation in general is divided into
three things in regards of system menus:
1. Application launching (including most used apps submenu)
2. File Operations (file search, nautilus home, most used docs, future db-
based search a-la beos/spotlight)
3. Computer (Network, system & desktop prefs, about ubuntu, Logout/halt,
Help etc)

Putting all this stuff together, you just pull another KMenu. These are
three distinct operations and so they should have clarity. KDE completely
fails on this regard, Gnome is there only 2/3s of the way (Applications,
Computer).

Yes, this suggestion means that you would need to modify that menu applet
and add one more menu. But that's how you get a distinction and
originality for your product and you help evolve the platform instead of
reusing the default reference implementation. Isn't that what you always
tell me on mailing lists? "it's up to the distributors to modify this and
that". Well, I am waiting to see some real innovation here rather than
stucking up piles of menu items.

After the Warty release is out the door, we can have an in-depth discussion on
ubuntu-devel about the menus, judge the relative merits of different
arrangements, and make changes based on that. We're very close to our final
release, and it is too late to propose this type of significant change.

When the time comes, everyone will be able to express their opinions in a public
forum and we'll reach a consensus. Let's table the discussion for now.

Eugenia, the menu structure will change for HoaryHedgehog. We're not looking for
distinction and originality, we're looking for the best solution to the problem.
Now is not the time though, because we're at the tail end of our release ->
WartyWarthog is going out in mid-October. This will be covered both upstream and
during HoaryHedgehog, when it opens.

Jeff, is this bug to close with the new panel ?

Mmm, roughly. :-)