A couple of days ago, I saw a classmate (who has never used Ubuntu before) login, look at the screen for a moment, click on 'Applications', point at 'Internet' and click on 'Firefox Web Browser'. I think it's really cool when someone who has never used an interface before can find what they want in mere seconds. Naturally, this is helped to a certain degree by how well-known Firefox itself is, but the fact that he completely ignored the Firefox logo on the top panel and went straight in this manner makes it seem to me that the Gnome menu is well designed¹.
By contrast, I can never find anything easily in my Windows menus which is why Vista's little search box in the menu is great. It doubles as what Alt-F2 is in Gnome, so I can just type cmd and hit Enter knowing what I'll get. I also like that most-used applications are displayed by default.
¹ Then again, Marc told me about some people who browsed the Fedora menu, looked at Applications » Accesories, saw Text Editor, and then continued to search elsewhere for Notepad.
3 comments
It wasn't an issue with the menu. They never understood that Notepad was a text editor. For them, Notepad was a program that created 'Notepad files' which had a .txt extension for some reason.
Also Launchy on Windows is better.
Your classmates are hilarious.
Launchy seems to be a nice clone of a very cool feature I remember using on Enlightenment DR17, just like Gnome Do. Very cool.