SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (nick-named SLED by the community) Service Pack 1 will feature an updated “slab” menu. Currently SLED’s main menu looks something like this:
Ted Haeger walks us through the changes Novell has made since the debut of the menu:
There’s more on the changes in GNOME Main Menu at Ted Haeger’s blog. Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of the GNOME project, also has an interesting bit of back-story concerning GNOME Main Menu:
In the early days of the main menu the search bar was at the bottom of the main menu, similar in spirit to Vista, but this prototype existed before Vista integrated it.
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During the routine usability tests that are conducted in the Cambridge office, one of the tasks that was part of the test was something along the lines of “Find the document that contains foo”. But people would not use the built-in search, they did not notice it on the main menu. Instead people went to the file manager and started opening file by file to find the document.
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When the search was moved to the top, the subjects in the usability tests immediately started using it.
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Then Vista released their first menu with search integrated at the bottom of the menu. I have been wondering if the guys in the Vista team had conducted any similar tests with their start menu.
So far my instincts with Vista have been similar in that I have not been naturally driven to use the search interface from the main menu (though I haven’t quite thought about why).
The code for Novell’s updates is available from GNOME’s CVS repository and I expect these updates will be making their way out to the various distros that support the gnome-main-menu package. I need to checkout the source and build it before I comment any further.
Update: From the Ubuntu Forums I found a weblog entry that walks through the steps to build GNOME Main Menu on Fiesty Fawn (Ubuntu’s unstable branch).