Re: session manager help

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 04:05, Havoc Pennington wrote:

>  - an absolutely essential feature we don't have is checking that the
>    user has a panel, desktop manager, and window manager, and making
>    sure they click all kinds of safety dialogs before we let them be
>    disabled permanently. A persistent issue seen on user mailing lists 
>    is "I lost my panel!" or worse, "I lost my window manager!"

Personally I still think a user should be able to turn off all their
panels if they want to (without having to click through any safety
alerts)... the harder piece of the puzzle is giving them an easy way to
turn them back on again without (a) resorting to the command line or (b)
losing everything that was on them before.
 
>  - the startup programs / session management control panel sucks
>    mightily. "startup programs" is legitimate functionality but this
>    UI for it is awful. A nicer UI for it might even let you change
>    your window manager, desktop manager, etc.

Nils proposed a redesign for this at one point but I don't have the URL
handy... a quick search of the archives should turn it up though.

To Havoc's list, I'd add:

- The annoying "the following programs won't be restarted when you next
log in" dialog is, well, annoying... at the very least it should time
out so you don't wander away from your terminal thinking you've logged
out when you haven't.  Better would be if it popped up next time you
logged in rather than the last time you logged out, when it's rather
more relevant.  Perhaps also, since it knows what apps you were running
(but not what you were doing with them), it could at least try to
restart them for you even if it can't reload whatever docuements etc.
you were looking at, and not bother you with the dialog at all :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems