GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 301829
Applications menu title should be icon or text, not both
Last modified: 2020-11-06 20:20:46 UTC
Distribution/Version: Ubuntu 5.04 The Applications menu title has both an icon (the Gnome logo) and some text ("Applications"), with no border around the two. This makes it look, to the first-time user, as if it's two separate menus -- especially since no other menu title in Gnome (that I can find) has such an appearance. I suggest either getting rid of the icon, or turning the "System" menu into the first menu with the Gnome icon and nothing else as its title. (Apologies if this has been reported previously; I did search.)
(Sorry for the late answer, I was busy with other things) Matthew: what you're describing looks like a MacOS menu, isn't it? I'm not sure I quite agree with you since the first time you click on either the icon or the text, you can see that both form only one menu... Bryan: what do you think of this?
Windows, Mac OS, OS/2, BeOS, whatever -- none of them, as far as I know, use(d) icon+text for any of their menu titles. Usually they use text for a title, and occasionally they use an icon for a title, but never both at once. It is true that you're likely to remember it after the first time you've clicked, but it's still unnecessary, and it breaks your mental model for panel items. That is, you can't tell without clicking whether anything else in the panel is an item by itself, or whether it's magically glued to the thing next to it.
Actually, the Windows Start button uses both an icon and the text "Start", but of course, that's not technically a menu title. It would have been considered as one if it was placed on top of the screen as in Gnome though.
(And despite Windows 98 and later having toolbar buttons that don't look like buttons, the Start button has always unmistakably been one button.)
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