Browser Bookmarks Menu (Gnome Applet) 0.1

["Nigel Tao" <nigel tao myrealbox com>]

This is mostly an announcement, but I would like to know what desktop-devel people think about the idea in general.  I also had some technical questions, but I posted those to the pygtk mailing list.



Gnome has an Applications menu, and an Actions menu.  One of the most frequent things that I do with my computer is browse my favorite web sites, so I hacked up a "Bookmarks menu" panel applet to streamline the task - the panel applet is easier to hit with the mouse than the two-step process of the little 24x24 application launcher for the browser followed by the browser's Bookmarks menu (although to make this a little easier my browser launcher lives in one of Fitts' favorite corners).



This idea seems to have been tried before (see RELATED WORK section below), but various similar projects appear out-of-date or incomplete.  Am I re-inventing the wheel?  Have people been looking for something like this?  Is this old-fashioned now that we all use RSS instead of bookmarks?



Is this an improvement or is it clutter?  Should this be a top-level menu or should this live under Actions (or what Ubuntu calls "Computer")?



A screenshot is worth a thousand words, and is at http://browserbookapp.sourceforge.net/screenshot-0.1.png



Source code (GPL) is at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=122136&package_id=133931&release_id=278276




CAVEAT

------

Right now it only reads Firefox bookmarks.





RELATED WORK

------------

An old (1999) mailing list post talks about creating a Netscape Bookmarks sub-menu of the foot menu (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devel-list/1999-September/msg00024.html) - Miguel de Icaza replied that "it seems a very good idea", but I don't know where it went from there.  One of the other replies mentions that PyGnome 1.4 had a Netscape bookmarks applet (pygnome/examples/bookmarks-applet.py) as an example, but this seems to have been dropped in more recent versions of gnome-python.



Gnome Bookmarks Organizer (gnobog) at http://www.nongnu.org/gnobog/ is slightly different (it has its own frame rather than being a panel applet) and looks like it's been superseded by Firefox's Bookmarks sidebar.



The Nautilus-Menu applet (http://bitpoetry.com/programs/nautilusmenu/) and bookmark-applet (http://gnomefiles.org/app.php?soft_id=278, but the download link is broken - anyone got an update?) look pretty similar, but they provide access to GTK file-chooser bookmarks (local files), not provide access to the browser bookmarks (URLs).  Also somewhat related is that Ubuntu provides menu items for Home, Desktop, and Filesystem (http://osdir.com/screenshots/gnome2.8/35.gif), but Fedora Core 3 looks like it will not - I'm not sure where vanilla Gnome 2.8 sits.





cheers,

Nigel.