Re: Application names in menus

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

snickell stanford edu writes: 
> For web browser though, there's a little out... Namely, I think the web
> browser should be in displayed in the root of the Applications menu
> (possibly in addition to being internet, but possibly in place of).
> Pretty much everyone wants convenient access to web browsers (the
> evidence in my mind being that pretty much everyone who knows how to
> create launchers has a launcher on the panel for their web browser
> ;-)

Note though that with the foot menu instead of the foobar, you already
have all of Actions in the root of the menu ;-)

> But for other things. Say having two word processors. Well, if you're
> going to install them, I think you should put them in the same place. To
> do otherwise will probably end up being rather confusing. As you point
> out, its worth considering if you could install only one, but that's not
> *always* going to be the right answer.

Problem is that if you do this for Red Hat Linux, the result is
totally unusable menus. There's just too much "stuff" that gets
installed; part of it is that it's hard to get certain things out of
the default install due to logistics (e.g. a bunch of duplicate or
silly control panels and config tools that come with gnome or kde),
part of it is that people choose "Everything" or other silly install
options when they shouldn't and don't really know what they are doing.

> One idea I've been toying around with in conjunction with the tasks
> based menu (since applications could register themselves as handling
> generic tasks like "can create spreadsheet") is allowing some sort of
> filtering in the menus. So there's a preference page that allows you to
> choose the preferred web browser, e-mailer, word processor, spreadsheet,
>  chat program, whatever. GNOME by default shows only your preferred item
> in the menus then with the generic name.

I do think that's a good idea, but runs into the logistical headache
of implementing it for both gnome and kde. 

Havoc