Re: gnome-recent in libegg

[James Willcox <jwillcox cs indiana edu>]

On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, James Henstridge wrote:

<snip>

> Sounds like a good idea to have in libegg.
>
> It would probably be a good idea to do a writeup of how the code should
> be used.  Maybe include some comparisons with how windows and MacOS
> handle this.  Some other things you might want to consider are:
>
>     * recently used documents for a particular application (like the
>       list often found at the bottom of the file menu), or desktop wide
>       (like the documents submenu off the start menu on windows), or both?

gnome-recent keeps both per-user and per-application lists, so having both
menus you described is easy.

>     * Should programs that edit the same file types have the same recent
>       lists? (ie. is it the 4 last documents edited with GEdit, or the 4
>       last text/plain documents edited?)
>

This seems like something the usability guys should decide upon, though
gnome-recent would generally work well in either case (the current API
calls for "appname", but that could simply be changed to "mime type").
One problem would be if an app supported multiple mime types.  There
wouldn't be any easy way to do that with the current code.

> I am sure you can think of other things.  Looking at these issues should
> help make sure the code is useful to the maximum number of people.
>  There was some code to handle recent documents in older versions of
> libgnome or libgnomeui, but no one ever used it (I can't remember if it
> was due to it being a bad API, lack of visibility or something else).
>  It would be good to make sure the replacement is done right.

Yeah, it is here:
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/libgnome/gnome-gnome-history.html

>
> Note that writing this up is not a waste of time -- it can become part
> of the documentation of your code.  It will also make it easier for
> others to comment/contribute.

I have a draft version of something like this here:
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jwillcox/gnome-recent.txt

Thanks,
James