Re: what's going on with menus?

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Tue, 18 May 2004 18:13:42 +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 	What I'd really love to see is someone trying out ideas (even just
> mockups) for (5) and (6) and discussing them here ...

Not got time to do trials or even mockups I'm afraid, but two things I'd
like to see are:

* A global view of all .desktop files available. Should be easy as the run
dialog effectively already does this. The idea here is that you can have
lots of applications installed but only a few in the menu, but you can
still drag the applications onto the panel, and in future do things that
might be a bit hard with menus like dragging them into the trash can,
copy/pasting etc. A nautilus view would be fine, kind of like
applications-all-users:/// except ignoring the menu spec and just
presenting all apps together. Alternatively a dedicated app might be
better, I'm not sure, a single icon view may be too cluttered.

Rather than having a specific menu editor app then, removing an item from
the menu becomes dragging it to the trash can, and adding it becomes
dragging from the applications folder.

* A way to query which menu entries were created in the last X hours/days
etc in libmenu, so then gnome-panel could do the XP thing and highlight
recently created items so users can find them. That's especially critical
seeing as how entry creation is automatic, you can have to hunt around for
them.

For the menu API being able to take a given .desktop file and get the menu
path(s) that it would be placed in would be very handy for 3rd party
apps/installers too.

thanks -mike