That said I think that the OS X ‘Services’ concept would be great in GNOME. Although I can’t seem to find a good reference to it! But essentially every program can attach actions to objects – so if you highlight some text in the terminal you can go to the ‘Services’ menu and do a bunch of things.

I’m told it’s a NextStep concept and that they did a lot more with it – making it pervasive ‘task orientated’.

Use case: a user commonly uses Evolution to manage their calendar but uses Thunderbird to check their e-mail. “Compose e-mail” should open up a Thunderbird compose window, and “Create appointment” should open an appointment window in Evolution.

Obviously something like this wouldn’t be as easy as just extending .desktop files and adding actions to them.

d-d-l discussion: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-May/msg00126.html

This is a little like what MS does with the “Internet” and “E-mail” icons at the top of the Start menu in XP, except worlds better!

I tried to think of what my parents do with their computers. My father mostly creates new menus (he’s a chef) and my mother mostly listens music and reads news on the web.

Now think about the applications installed on your computer. There are dozends. And each of them has about two or three “actions”. This results in a very big menu. And as we all know; big menues are useless.

Back to my parents. The tasks my mother needs (”Browse the net” and “Listen to music” are to ambiguous to be helpful. Listen to what music? Browse what internet site? All this task-starter can do ist start the right application, not more.

Almost the same goes for my father. He mostly copies an old menu and just makes the changes. What task would be the right for him? “Create a new text document by copying the date from a new one?” Hell, what a name.

I do think that task oriented GUIs are the future. I do not think however that this is the right way.

The applications are already well categorised, so Joe User is already going to see “Ah the Applications menu, my email client must be up there somewhere….” “… Ah, internet, is it in there? What about Office”.

Now, when the hoevers the cursor over the “Evolution Email” icon for more than 2 seconds, a further submenu (stick with me here… a sub menu may not be the way, but it definitely needs to be something “appearing”) flys out containing a list of no more than 7 actions associated with that application. Clicking an action will open the application ready to perform that action, or clicking the application icon will start the application as per usual.

Further to this, you’d need a spec in the .desktop files to assign “known actions” to an application. Gnome would have predefined known actions (as a previous poster mentioned, there could be many, and a schema approach could permit new applications to install new actions, though there would have to be a limit somewhere). The .desktop for an application could contain a KnownActions section, list a known action (for e.g. “SendNewEmail”), and pair it with the commandline arguments / other command to run to complete that action from the application.

Seems a bit zany I know, but I like the current menu spec, and I’d rather see an extension to that paradigm than the introduction of another panel top level menu item.

Feel free to email me at jon_cooperuk@-nospamharvesting-hotmail.com with any discussion relating to this idea.