The Application menu
Up to the menu. As you can see it’s subdivided in 5 sub-menus, between which you can switch on the bottom of the menu:
- Favorites
- Applications
- Computer
- Recently Used
- Leave
On top of the menu there’s a text entry widget which provides search functionality.
Inside the applications menu, you can choose the primary category of the application you’re looking for. Once chosen a primary category, you’re presented several sub-categories, between which you need to choose again, after which you see a list of applications in this sub-category. This is useful in some categories, but overkill in others. An example: in the “Multimedia” category, there’s a “Volume Control” sub-category, which only hosts one application: “Sound Mixer”. I can’t imagine there are tons of “Volume Control” applications, so it might be better to keep the “Sound Mixer” entry in the main “Multimedia” category? Same for printing options: Utilities -> Printing -> Manage Printing, whilst there are no printing tasks on a normal system, except managing your printers.
Some re-ordering or renaming of categories might be useful. I’d like to mention the “Utilities -> Desktop” category, which seems to be some sort of ‘dumpbin’: I see a “Character Selector”, “Color Chooser”, “Screen Magnifier”, “Automatic Mouse Click”, “Speech Synthesizer Frontend”, “ScreenRuler”, “Screen Capture Program”, “Text-to-Speech Manager”, “Qt4 Settings” and “Desktop Widgets”. I don’t think the accessibility applications belong here and could go in a separate category. As there’s a main settings application, the Qt4 settings could/should be integrated in there too.
There’s one thing I really dislike about this menu: unless the application you want to launch is available in your Favorites or Recently Used list, you need to perform 4 clicks to start it: open the menu, choose main category, sub-category, and finally click the application itself. As mentioned before, removing some sub-categories might be a wise decission.
One more minor detail: when hovering over a menu-icon, the bump of the icon isn’t very smooth 
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