Global Menu Bar1 min read

Recently, mother was trying to remember how to email photos from f-spot again. Although it is simple enough in essence, she keeps forgetting the procedure. No big deal, though. I made her try on her own for a while before giving hints/tips, so that she can concentrate and, likely, learn better. However, something grabbed my attention a few days ago. I saw that she was yet again looking wrongly into the Applications and Places (raccourcis) top menus. I asked, “did you notice there are two separate menus?”, and she had not.

Possible explanations:

• This is the reason why Windows’ start menu and task bar are at the bottom of the screen by default, as far away as possible from the application menus and toolbars. However, I find this setup to be much inefficient, because the mouse cursor spends the vast majority of time at the upper half of the screen due to said toolbars and menus. And frankly, I doubt the UI designers at Microsoft were that clever, especially as far as Windows 95.
• I am a bad, terrible UI fanatic (I am still not convinced that my parent’s UI setup is the “perfect thing”, although I know there is no such thing as perfection in usability) and should stop caring about these things.
• NeXT + Apple/Mac OS had it 100% right, all along.