Ubuntu desktop moving application menus back into application windows

by
in linux on (#3EK)
story imageArs Technica reports that the next version of Ubuntu (14.04, or Trusty Tahr ; a Long Term Support Release) will allow users an option to display menu bars inside their parent application windows -- a move away from Mac OSX interface conventions towards the menu placement more commonly used in Windows.

"Despite displaying the menu contents outside of the window, the menus are still window-specific," we noted in a review of Ubuntu 12.04 in May 2012. "By design, the global menu bar displays the menu of the focused window. This proves awkward in some applications with dialogs and multiple windows."

The intended result is to "fix the main UX bug we have [had] in Unity since its very first release: the menus being hard to find or too far from their parent window ", according to a blog post Canonical employee Marco Trevisan . "The amount of technical work needed [is] not to be underestimated [...] one of the blockers we had in 12.04 was our dependency on the legacy compiz decor plugin + gtk-window-decorator, that has worked 'OK' in the last years but -- apart from using deprecated technologies (gtk2 in primis) -- it really would have made this concept impossible to realize."

A tahr appears to be some species of mountain goat indigenous to the Himalayas.

Re: I actually like global menus ... (Score: 1)

by danieldvorkin@pipedot.org on 2014-02-21 21:01 (#48)

Well, yeah--the decision to put that option in is one of the few times I can think of recently where the people in charge of UI (don't get me started on "UX") have actually listened to their users. I just wish it happened more often, and that there weren't so many boneheaded, arbitrary changes in the first place.
Post Comment
Subject
Comment
Captcha
George's name is?