I am in the process of reviewing Wine's resource files and more specifically the menus of its applications, and even more specifically the Help menu for now.
Currently they are a bit inconsistent and I propose to standardise them by following the GNOME interface guidelines. That is use the following structure:
Help Contents F1 About
So here is the data I gathered on this eminently critical issue ;-)
Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines ----------------------------------------------
* The section about standard menus say we should use: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511502.aspx Help <program name> help F1 <separator> About <program name>
* All applications seem to conform to the specification for the 'About' menu (except Sound Recorder which uses 'About' and Disk Management which incorrectly adds an ellipsis).
* But for the 'Help' menu there is a lot of inconsistency. In Windows 7 I got: 'View Help': Notepad, Solitaire, Mine Sweeper, Calculator, FreeCell, Internet Backgammon, Spider Solitaire '<program name> Help': Internet Explorer 8 '<program name> Help Topics': Task Manager 'Help Topics': Regedit, Task Scheduler, Disk Management 'Help': Sound Recorder 'Contents': msinfo32 'None' (replaced by a toolbar icon): Explorer, Paint, XPS Viewer, Windows Media Player, Backup and Restore, Sync Center
* From the point above I conclude that following the Microsoft Guidelines will not particularly help consistency with other Windows applications, nor help meet the users expectations.
* Putting the program name in the menu name means we will have as many strings to translate as there are programs. This is more work for translators and can yield inconsistencies from one program to the next.
* Putting the program name in the menu name also feels redundant to me. Does one really expect Regedit to give you the help for Notepad? Similarly one would expect an 'About' menu to be about the current program, although in Wine's case it's more a generic About dialog.
Unix Interface Guidelines -------------------------
* The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines specify: http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/2.32/hig-book.html#menu-standard-hel... Help Contents F1 About
* This allows sharing of the translations across programs.
* It would make Wine's applications consistent with the system ones... as long as one uses Gnome.
* Because unfortunately this is a case where the KDE User Interface Guidelines differ: http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/style/menus/help.html Help <program name> Handbook... F1 What's This? Shift+F1 <separator> About <program name>... About KDE...
* Using ellipses as specified for these menus makes absolutely no sense and is inconsistent with their own guidelines regarding them. Fortunately this seems to be a bug in the specification and the applications don't uses ellipses (feel free to report this bug).
* Both GNOME and KDE applications follow their guidelines pretty well. (except Gnome's Network Tools app which uses 'Help Ctrl+H' instead of 'Contents F1', maybe another bug to report)
* However other applications, specifically FireFox and OpenOffice seem to follow the Windows guidelines. VMware Workstation follows them for the About menu, but follows GNOME's guidelines for the 'Contents' help menu.
* So given that we cannot be consistent with all Unix applications I propose to pick the scheme that requires the less work for us, which is GNOME's scheme.
On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 4:02 PM, Francois Gouget fgouget@free.fr wrote:
I am in the process of reviewing Wine's resource files and more specifically the menus of its applications, and even more specifically the Help menu for now.
Currently they are a bit inconsistent and I propose to standardise them by following the GNOME interface guidelines. That is use the following structure:
Help Contents F1 About
So here is the data I gathered on this eminently critical issue ;-)
...
Great summary. Inconsistent menus always bothered me in wine; had filed bugs 18973 and 19347 for similar issues a while back. I'm really happy about the recent cleanup of all the unimplemented menu items, they were truly annoying.
My first instinct would have been to support the Windows guidelines, but seeing as MS themselves do not respect them, there isn't much point to that.
The KDE guidelines are very specific to KDE. The "What's this" is a Qt feature which, for some reason, is being enforced on all KDE apps (despite being completely unused, and usually unimplemented). It's safe to say that overall, the KDE guidelines are pointless to follow for Wine.
As for OO/Firefox, they tend to be Windows GUI designs ported to GTK rather than the opposite, so it makes sense they would follow Windows guidelines.
Fully agreed on supporting the HIG on that one.
-- Francois Gouget fgouget@free.fr http://fgouget.free.fr/ Stolen from an Internet user: "f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgrmmng !"
-- Jerome Leclanche
Francois Gouget fgouget@free.fr writes:
- Putting the program name in the menu name also feels redundant to me. Does one really expect Regedit to give you the help for Notepad? Similarly one would expect an 'About' menu to be about the current program, although in Wine's case it's more a generic About dialog.
I agree that the program name is not needed for something like 'Contents'. However, 'About' all by itself doesn't feel right. 'About <program>' is IMO preferable for grammatical reasons, even if it's a little extra work for translators.
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Alexandre Julliard -
Francois Gouget -
Jerome Leclanche