Re: bookmark management and other code reuse

[Alan <alan ufies org>]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2003 at 04:34:08PM -0400, David Adam Bordoley wrote:
> Marius Andreiana writes: 
> 
> >There are several gnome applications which implement bookmark management
> >( galeon, ephiphany, nautilus, gftp, yelp ). The degree of usability and
> >functionality varies from great ( galeon ) to very bad ( gftp ) and
> >planning ( yelp ). I don't know how it is in ephiphany. 
> >
> >I think the galeon bookmarks code is completely separated from main
> >code, need to check this. I suggest to the other application developers
> >to use that too. I CC'ed gftp author, yelp already has a bug with this. 

IIRC Marco and the galeon devs were talking about bonoboizing the
bookmarks editor long ago, when it became the new hotness...  Not sure
if anything came of that though.

> While i think the concept of system wide bookmarks is a good one, I think 
> you will have a hard time convincing other projects to go with one system 
> or another. This is mainly due to issues of ui. Speaking on behalf of 
> epiphany, we have spent a substantial amount of time redesigning our 
> bookmark system to be more database like as oppose to folder (file system) 
> like ala galeon, and we are very happy with the result in terms of 
> usability. Of course if other core gnome projects were interested in using 
> the epiphany bm approach in their project i'm sure we could work on it. 

We're not talking about system wide bookmarks as in "all my bookmarks
stored in one place", or "one interface to bookmarks"?  Assuming the
latter is intended, I'd have to agree.  99% of the gnome programs out
there don't re-implement the save dialog, so why not create a *really
good* bookmark interface that is available to all.  

I wouldn't want to force it on programmers (not that could of course),
but having something that is robust and full featured available to a
programmer when writing application [foo] that may need bookmarks
would/could be a good idea.  I watched galeon's bookmarks go from ok to
great as far as the interface went, and some of the features in
epiphany's bookmarks are pretty cool as well.

How horrible would it be to take the current contenders in the bookmarks
theatre and fleshing out a design that has the best features of all, in
an easy to use UI, and then implementing it as a separate (bonobo object|current
best wiz bang technology that gnome is using), with hooks in the api to
allow developers to tack on their own features, or disable others (ie:
funky feature X may be appropriate for [foo], but not [bar])?

Or is my head in the clouds and a bunch of people are going to reply
with "we're waiting for the code" :)

I know it's a tall order, but if something like this is going to happen
(or should happen) how would it go forward?

alan

-- 
Alan <alan ufies org> - http://arcterex.net
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"The only thing that experience teaches us is that experience teaches 
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