I always remove the Mint menu and add the Gnome main menu to the panel as my novice users find the Mint menu very confusing
but the Gnome menu developers have not included the lower entries from "Places down" in the right hand panel of "edit menu" so you can unselect them
I understand the developers thinking but disagree with them, I just went to the
http://www.gnome.org site and can't see anywhere to ask about menus.
I like the edit menu screen for Gnome it's very, very well done, it's just what they have omitted from it.
Also maybe you could add a launcher to the Control Center otherwise the users won't be able to reach the system settings except by launching it manually (alt+f2).
It's very much "Horses for coarses" one lady I put a laptop together for is only happy if Firefox auto starts with facebook loaded and Rythmbox playing her music and that applies to most of the folk(novices) I help, most of what they do nowadays(games) are browser based so they need a good menu system in their browser and the Firefox add-on Speed Dial does that admirably you can launch apps or gadgets from it.
The other thing they like to autoload is aMSN, I've shown them Pidgin but they are happier in aMSN.
It normally takes them a long time before they use the OS menu so I like to keep it small and simple.
but right click and add a menu isn't very difficult.
Ideally I think what I need is a tree menu written in Java that will run on any OS Desktop that I can tweak but most/all seem to be written to run in a browser rather than on the desktop. I might communicate with this guy later
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Prog ... Genie.html
I downloaded LXDE and looked at the menus but didn't see an easy way to create a quick launch bar where you could dragndrop things but it was a quick look.
Every OS/app has a menu and that is the most important part, it is the end users point of contact with any OS/app, they assume that an OS/app does what it's supposed to do but the menu is their contact point, the end user experience, it's got to be intuitive.
I started up a small roofing company in the late 80's and had a friend who developed bespoke databases using a system called Sculptor which would compile into Unix or Dos. I visited him on a Sunday for many years and I learned how to tweak screen forms.
One app came out that had a top line drop down menu system, up till then all apps used the bottom two lines for menus and info, immediately all the other apps brought out top line menus.
Then Windows 3.1 came out and the OS menu went back to the bottom and while you can move it to the top most Windozs apps even now haven't been written to allow for this outrageous behavior.
, Linux allows this thankfully.
and all apps have stayed with topline menus.
Folk look up not down, down is where the small print is, not important stuff.
M$ do do some good things worth copying/improving but not their bad things like bottom line menus, big obese menus and other daft things like you click on shut down and a "are you sure" screen pops up miles from where you clicked the original button, I still smile when I click my big red shut down button and it does what you expect it to do, shut down!. Thank you again, I use it for my novices but not the "restart" one, they don't ever restart.
After this post I will go to Tutorials/Howtos and the Community site and add the links to what we have done.
ukbrian
PS
Very unimpressed with the Community site, I think they have designed it to be pretty not functional, you can't preview a post before you submit it, sorry "Save this Tutorial" it, what's wrong with submit is it to simple/universal?
Well I posted it but can't see it anywhere all I can see is this
You are also promoting the following tutorials:
No tutorials promoted.
One day I might find out what it means but I doubt I will go back to the Community website, certainly not a user friendly place for me.
I just posted in Tutorials/Howtos and then found there were 32 stickies which might indicate the need to have some categories. to separate things a little but this newcomer has learnt his lesson and I will stop making suggestions to try improve things for newcomers
and it worked first time so my novices menus look like this now
thank you
