Re: spatial stuff detail

[Mike Hearn <mike theoretic com>]

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 23:08:00 +0200, Sir Guido Schimmels scribed thus:
> That must be why Gnome users for so long have whined about the state of
> menu-editing, because they have no interest at all to customize the
> menu. But users outside the corporate desktop obviously are irrelevant
> now. Nice sentiment.

You can't simply use appfolders for the menu without running into a whole
load of easy to forget but important problems, like internationalization.
Desktop files and vFolders have some fairly big advantages, like:

* They automatically appear in the users native language 
* They allow for icon theming
* They integrate well with the package management technology of today 
* They integrate well with multi user/root scenarios, so allowing admins to
nicely control the menus in network scenarios.

Now of course you can embed most of this info "within" the appfolder, but
then you just reinvented the .desktop file and made it harder to do things
like the superfast auto-complete run dialog GNOME now has.

> No you have __one__: The file-manager. You obviously never used the
> Finder or ROX-Filer. The start menu is redundant when you do it like
> that. Plain in simple.

I've used both the Finder and ROX-Filer, and if you think running these
programs suddenly automagically makes the start menu redundant then you
have some more thinking to do. Last time I checked, ROX did not suck up
all the entries from the start menu and overlay them onto your
Applications directory.

Of course you can produce wrappers for every single app, but then you've
just recreated a menu system but using lots of files and directories.

> And you don't need much categorisation either. /Applications/Utilities
> /Applications/Internet
> Applications/Games
> and the rest goes flat into /Applications. What's the point of digging
> through submenus all the time?

$ ls /usr/share/applications /usr/local/share/applications | wc -l
    135

Now I rarely use all of them, but I think I've run about 80% of the items
in my menu at least once. They are there when I need them. Having them all
in a few folders like MacOS does it would be crazy. They are totally
different worlds, you can't treat them the same.

> It works for the MacOS, so it can work for Gnome. How arrogant to think
> to know better. When I'm on crack, Apple usability engineers must be
> too. Only Gnome and Sun hackers have seen the light. Yeah right.

Apples usability engineers aren't the world respected experts they once
were, if you noticed. They seem to play second fiddle to eye candy these
days.

It's also ridiculous to think that what "works" for MacOS can work
for GNOME, and entirely different project, developed in a different way,
that works under an entirely different set of constraints.

> When I joined the thread, I wanted to inform the Gnome community we are
> working on such a system and that it can be done, because I have already
> such an environment right here on my desktop (posting this from a
> relocatable Balsa appdir). That's all.

Well done. Once you've figured out:

* a way to make this work on the systems being used today
 that doesn't require users to replace large chunks of their distro

* viable conversion and backwards compatability plans for the community 

* an answer to dependencies that doesn't involve "local exploits don't
matter" nor "i am the authority on which libraries are important enough to
share and which aren't"

* how to get the benefits of systems like scrollkeeper, GConf etc with
appdir style systems

then maybe I shall be more interested.

thanks -mike