GNOME PowerUI project

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

I'd like to encourage people to look at the PowerToys download for
Windows XP, and how it works. This is basically an add-on for XP that
adds lots of little features such as multiple workspaces, sloppy
focus, and so on. One of the main PowerToys components is TweakUI
which is a control center type of thing with lots of advanced options.

libwnck exists precisely because I wanted to encourage people to play
around with different pager/tasklist kind of ideas. In GNOME 2 you see
several such ideas: a simple pager, a simple tasklist, and the window
menu in the menu panel. But using libwnck you can easily write all
kinds of different gadgets for controlling the desktop without having
to understand any low-level X window system details.

I think it would be great if someone enthusiastic started a project
that included some different panel applets, a nice UI for the "hidden"
preferences, and all that sort of thing. The project would be really
popular, but would not interfere with keeping the core of GNOME simple
- and the core should be simple for technical reasons, not just
usability reasons.

GNOME is very modular, take advantage of that. We allow you to replace
almost any component, often while reusing code such as libwnck from
the existing components.

PowerUI allows those of us who want a simple, robust core desktop to
keep that feature, while still accomodating people who want complex
features.

Havoc