I think it'd be great to give the world menu a make-over..  Having
separate menus for the docking bar and world could be "richer"..
Maybe the docking bar could be just a sub-set of the world menu,
because there are a lot of things that are not on the docking bar,
right?

I think it's great when we can simplify (e.g., try to improve the
system by removal, not addition) the system while at the same time
striving to make it more conventional for newcomers.  The challenge is
to do it in a way that increases, or at least matches, existing
functionality and usability..  For example, right now I'm able to
navigate the world menu with the keyboard; I wouldn't want to lose
that..  :)

Thanks,
  Chris


On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 11:06 AM, Casey Ransberger
<casey.obrien.r at gmail.com> wrote:
> Awhile ago we added a docking bar, because the world menu is often harder
> for newcomers to find at first than we tend to want to think. We put some
> key use cases there, most key of which is Help, which is probably more
> important to newcomers than experienced users.
> I noticed that the help... entry in the world menu contained some stuff that
> was very questionably help-related, moved it out to the docking bar. I
> pretty much emptied out the help... item on the world menu, so I removed but
> Chris pointed out that not everyone uses the docking bar and put it right
> back, suggesting that we find a way to generate the same menu in both
> contexts (which I think is a great idea, and will investigate today.)
> The question in my mind though, is: where do we stop with that? What do
> people think: should there be any separation of concerns between the world
> menu and the docking bar? (My thought was, some things made more sense on
> the docking bar than the cluttered world menu, but if not everyone uses the
> docking bar... yeah.) Or are the world menu and the docking bar best serving
> the user as two different views into the exact same functionality?
> From an implementation perspective, I much prefer the canvas-ish style of
> what's in the docking bar presently. The data-driven style of the world
> menu, while very terse, makes my eyes glaze over. I'm tempted to rip into it
> and and refactor it to use a canvas-ish API (making the two more
> compatible,) but I'm liable to introduce regressions that way, and we're
> fairly locked down at present, no?
> Anyway, I was hoping to get a feel for what people think about this stuff.
>
>
>