Respect My Start Menu

Developers must not use the Start menu. Otherwise, they would've at least considered that no one in their right mind would look for a program based on its publisher. When I think of Half-Life, I think of sweet, sweet FPS gaming. The word "Sierra" doesn't cross my mind. Logical Start menu placement results in increased usability, which has never proven to be a bad thing. But maybe the developers had nothing to do with this, in which case...

Stop trying to sneak advertisements into my Start menu. I know you exist EA, and I also know you publish a thousand games a year and most of them are shit. Like the screenwriter in movies, developers never get their due credit in Start menu placement, which would make a bit more sense. I would actually care if Valve released a new game, but how many games do you need on your computer that they might warrant separate listings.

Dear installation program, please recognize the Games folder in my Start menu and do your damnedest to put your shortcuts there. Installing programs is tedious and I get in the habit of clicking the Next button without reading. My antivirus is cool with it, and the button's always in the same place. I'm not gonna read the EULA anyway. You know you don't.

So I could just read the individual screens and edit the path. Standard installation programs still contain no intuitive way to nest shortcut folders. You either install it straight into the applications folder, or have your power user friend tell you to separate the nested directories with a backslash.

This rant may have gone on for too long, but I was going for definitive status. Most software isn't as bad as, say, AOL, which dumps shortcuts and installation files onto your hard drive that you didn't even want. It even puts them each in their own folder on the C: drive. Oh, the obsessive compulsive's agony.

But to be honest, I don't really use the Start menu. My taskbar is two bars thick, one bar the currently active applications, the other the quick launch bar, hosting every application I could ever want quick access to. I have no real need for any shortcuts hiding behind the Start button. Not that I'd be able to find anything anyway.