A new (nearly finished) logout dialog

Matthew Paul Thomas mpt at canonical.com
Thu Dec 8 16:31:48 GMT 2005


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On 8 Dec, 2005, at 11:58 AM, Manu Cornet wrote:
> ...
>> ---------------------
>>   Sleep
>>   Hibernate
>>   Restart
>>   Shut Down
>> ---------------------
>>   Lock Screen
>>   Switch Account...
>>   Log Out
>
> Do you think we should have so many items in the System menu ?

There would be 13 items altogether, which is a bit long, though not 
awful. Three pie-in-the-sky ways of shortening the menu:
1.  moving "Help" and "About" to a separate "Help" menu (easy, but the
     help isn't useful enough to warrant its own menu at the moment);

> This is the way Mac OS X does it, but it has much fewer items (doesn't 
> have Hibernate,

2.  merging "Sleep" and "Hibernate" into a single command like newer
     versions of Mac OS X do, so "Sleep" suspends both to RAM and to
     disk (difficult);
3.  merging "Preferences" and "Administration", once enough applets
     have merged that such a combined menu would be sane (very
     difficult).

> nor Lock Screen, and Switch Account is located somewhere else).
>
> And considering that you chosse "Restart" for instance, you still need
> to display some confirmation dialog, and you still need to know 
> whether the user wants to save the session or not...

Not necessarily. I don't think "Save current session" is important 
enough to ask about at every exit. If saving the session is useful to 
you some of the time or all of the time, you can set that in the 
"Sessions" preferences. Then if you have the setting turned on but it's 
not useful on an individual occasion, that's no big deal, you can just 
close the windows you don't want before you log out (or after you've 
logged in the next time).

> Couldn't we just separate this into just two categories : on the one
> hand, actions that are going to induce a change on the system state
> (rebbot, or any kind of sleep/shutdown action), and the ones that only
> concerns user-switching related issues ?
> ...
> * Two items in the system menu. We need to find good titles for those,
> but for example "Manage session"

Windows calls this "Log Off".

> and "Shut Down" (huh, there's probably much better ^^). Each item 
> brings up a separate dialog, with respectively 3 and 4 buttons 
> (similar to what I have done so far) plus "Cancel" and "Save session" 
> checkbox.
> ...

If giving up the "Save session" checkbox is acceptable, another way 
would be to have an "Exit" submenu containing the items that would 
normally have a confirmation alert (Restart, Shut Down, and Log Out). 
The difficulty of entering the submenu would be equal to the difficulty 
of accepting a confirmation alert, so the alerts for those commands 
would no longer be necessary.

- --------------------
   Sleep
   Hibernate
- --------------------
   Lock Screen
   Switch Account...
   Exit             > | Log Out
                      | Restart
                      | Shut Down

> ...
> Somethings that bothers me is that we would have different places
> (top-right and System menu) where the same actions could be found, and
> I'm not convinced it's the best thing to do... Is the top-right icon
> really a good idea ?

I don't think so, but apparently sabdfl wants it.

> Or couldn't we just replace it with a mini-menu, with just two items 
> (like above) ? And in that case, would having these same two items in 
> both locations (top-right and System menu) be really necessary (we 
> could just remove them from the System menu) ?

That's a possibility.

> Pesonnally, I think that the upper-right part of the panel is already
> cluttered enough, and we should keep those actions in the System 
> menu...
> Is there some place on the wiki where strong arguments in favor of the
> top-right icon are shown ?
> ...

Not as far as I know.

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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