A few weeks ago I came across an idea posted on brainstrom about Mac-style menu bar. Didn't pay much attention to it until yesterday I read a tweet by Mike Basinger, the Ubuntuforums' admin, about his being happy with gnome2 globalmenu. So, I checked it out and its pretty cool, made me think why I didn't write about it earlier.
For those who have no idea what I am talking about, nerva, the idea poster, suggested that we have menu bars on all applications and we don't use them all at a time, so by making a global menu bar(say on top of gnome-panel) we can save a lot of screen space which could be of great use for notebooks and Eeepcs. Gnome GlobalMenu is one such project. Take a look at the following pic to get a better idea.
As you can see the concept is pretty clear, its going to be a dynamic menu, showing the menu bar of the active window. Since, the menu bar will no more depend upon the length of the window, it will be useful for narrow windows and also for apps which have a long menu bar (like GIMP or Inkscape). Well, it seems practical and useful.
This globalmenu is also a part of the Document Centric Desktop environment. Here is another screenshot.
Long back ago, Aqd coded mac-like panel applets for xfce and gnome. Here is a screenshot submitted by him.
Brainstorm Idea: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/3136/
Ubuntu Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/global_menu