Improve menu bar open/close animation

[Pepijn de Vos]

I tried Elementary OS today because I think it looks really promising, yet I got annoyed by the animation of opening a menu after 5 minutes of using it.

Steps to reproduce:

* Open the leftmost menu
* Realise the item you are looking for is 3 menu items to the right
* Move mouse across the menu bar horizontally
* Suffer epilpetic attack

The current behavior is to rapidly triger a dozen open and close animations.

My proposal would be to triger an open animation when I enter the menu bar, then switch menus instantly as long as my mouse remains inside the bar, and only triger the close animation when my mouse leaves the menu bar.

It also looks like the animation used is to grow/shrink the menu from the center, while I think it makes more sense to slide up/down from the menu bar.

[Pepijn de Vos (pepijndevos)]

I realised I'm not sure what part of Elementary is responsible for doing these animations. Maybe it's Gala? Comming to think of it, Granite is just the widget toolkit, right?

[Pepijn de Vos (pepijndevos)]

It is Gala indeed:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~gala-dev/gala/trunk/view/head:/src/Plugin.vala#L643

It seems like it would be fairly easy to change the animation, but tricky to only animate when entering the menu bar.
I think setting the gravity to North would look nicer for dropdown menus, but maybe popups look nicer as they are now.