The Menubar
The menubar provides a number of drop-down menus. Only the menu titles are displayed, until the user clicks on one of them.
The menubar is normally visible at all times and is always accessible from the keyboard, so make all the commands available in your application available on the menubar.
When your application is running in full screen mode, hide the menubar by default. However, make its menus and items accessible from the keyboard as usual. Pressing ESC should cause the application to leave full screen mode. A button should be placed in the upper right hand corner of the window. The button should disappear after the mouse is unused for 5 seconds, and should appear again when the moused is moved. Alternately, in applications where the mouse is used frequently in full screen mode, all but a two pixel row of the button may be slid off the top of the screen. The button should slide back on the screen when the mouse moves near it.
- Provide a menubar in each primary application window, containing at least a and a menu.
- Organize menu titles in the standard order— see Section 4.4 ― Standard Menus
- Do not disable menu titles. Allow the user to explore the menu, even though there might be no available items on it at that time.
- Menu titles on a menubar are single words with their first letter capitalized. Do not use spaces in menu titles, as this makes them easily-mistaken for two separate menu titles. Do not use compound words (such as ) or hyphens (such as ) to circumvent this guideline.
- Do not provide a mechanism for hiding the menubar, as this may be activated accidentally. Some users will not be able to figure out how to get the menu bar back in this case.