Taskdriven actions

Today I was wondering, on an ever lurking question of usability: “What would my productivity on the desktop increase?” An important factor is probably the ease of finding the right application for doing the job. I think a taskdriven interface is one of the best solutions.

I think we can improve this factor in GNOME by improving the way we start applications, one way would be to run the application from the ‘Applications’-menu on the menubar, but why don’t we add another menu for specific tasks or actions? Likewise:

Mockup of the Actions menu (thumbnail)

An application could register its actions for this menu in some kind of mimetypie or gtk-boomarkie way.

A downside will be that this would add another menu to the menubar, which makes it long and maybe hard to read. Also, some things in the System (or Desktop) menu are also actions. What about combining these menus or moving some menuitems around?

Maybe we had this before, or someone has already proposed it in the past, I was to lazy to check up history 🙂 Overall, I think this would be a neat idea.

By the way, anyone knows what this (below) is? I’m using blogs.gnome.org.