Comment 3 for bug 846374

In my opinion, re-work of the Applications lens is required... and this is certainly *not* low priority. Many new computer users that I have set up with Ubuntu (3rd world context) have greatly struggled with this. Only because of the 3rd party "stop gap" hack "classicmenu-indicator" have I been able to help people more easily browse and discover what applications are already installed.

Here are some additonal comments on design-rework help from my perspective:

1. Needs to be by category by default (I don't think that browsing a list of 129 Applications sorted alphabetically is useful to anyone).

2. Need to have quick keyboard navigation, or,

3. just "hover" over a category name to see the apps under the category.

4. Currently have to manually "unclick" filters if want to see a different category. So, if click "Games" need to then unclick "Games" before clicking "Office" or else you get "Games + Office". This concept is just not efficient or intuitive for beginning users, and beginning users are the ones that desperately need a usable Application Menu.

Here are some examples:

AxeMenu is a good one (Gnome-Shell: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/327/axe-menu/ but not their default of showing "favorites" but rather "Applications": also note when hovering over an App its description is showed in the bottom corner: again helpful as someone may not have a clue about what "Pidgin" does)

MintMenu (Linux Mint) is very similar to Axe Menu (maybe they share code??).

Lastly, Cardapio (https://launchpad.net/cardapio) is a good one to look at.

In summary, discoverability, especially for limited skill computer users, is essential and needs significant re-working over the current paradigm.