improving usability of the 'recent documents' menu

Ryan Lortie desrt at desrt.ca
Mon Dec 19 06:22:06 GMT 2005


I realised today that I really don't use the "recent documents" feature
of the Places menu at all.

I think the reason for this is that the menu item is in a really
inconvenient place and barely recognisable at all.

I think the functionality would be a lot easier to find and use if the
"recent documents" item were moved to the top of the places menu.  It
might also be worth while to move the search item up there too (but not
above recent documents).

If it were at the top of the menu the muscle-memory value alone would be
huge (right now muscle memory is practically useless for this item).
The very concept of recent items is to make it as easy as possible to
access (practically by definition) your commonly used documents.

The "home folder" item would not be significantly impacted because it
would still be a short distance away (just a tiny bit more).  Even if
existing users have built up a memory for this they won't be too badly
affected since releasing the mouse button (or clicking) on the "recent
documents" sub-menu won't do anything unexpected.

Just a random not-particularly-developed thought :)

Cheers.
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