[Deskbar] deskbar 2.20 impressions

[Nicholas J Kreucher <nick kreucher net>]

Hello All,

I just upgraded from Ubuntu 7.04 (GNOME 2.18) to Ubuntu 7.10 (GNOME
2.20) and have some first impressions about the new deskbar-applet. I
fell in love with this applet back in Ubuntu 6.10, and enjoyed watching
it evolve. Sadly, with the latest update, I fear my heart is now
breaking...

** Entry in panel mode gone!
This is extremely disappointing... Besides the fact using a hot-key to
access the search entry is totally non-obvious to the new user,
accessing the history is a full two clicks away! An extra step for an
application that is designed to make life quicker... three full clicks
to launch an application from history... same as "Applications" menu. I
really, really, really miss the entry in the panel.

** history very hard to scan visually 
The old deskbar history use to have specific icons instead of a generic
icons. It was very easy to, say, launch Pidgin by looking for that
unique purple icon in the history. And twinkle for it's yellow star. Now
it is a manual scan for the text among mostly orange icons--major strain
on the eyes.

Further, the icons in the popup are the actual app icons, which is
awesome... why does the history swap them out? Even a dictionary lookup,
or a tracker search request, have nice unique icons in the search, but
the have same orange icons in the history.

** history seems to remove might-be duplicate commands
Similar commands seem to be collapsed into one... for example, I switch
between my bluetooth mouse and trackpoint frequently. I found it super
handy to always have both "xset m 2/1" and "xset m 4/5" in the deskbar
history. Now, I only see the last one that had been executed (which, in
this case, is totally useless).

Please help bring deskbar-applet back to it's glory days on my
desktop :)

Thanks!

	- nick