Re: Evolution Plugins (Was Re: Rise of the Plugins)

[Sankar P <psankar novell com>]

On Sat, 2007-11-17 at 09:43 -0800, Dylan McCall wrote:
> That is interesting to know a bit better how Evolution is organized.
> Thanks Sankar.
> Still, that makes it seem like a whole lot of unnecessary engineering.
> We already have a shell: The GNOME desktop.
> A bit off topic, but the miniature shell idea makes Evolution very
> confusing to use. Program menus should not really change, but
> Evolution's are actually completely different depending on what
> component is being used. To make matters more confounding, many menu
> items change their position between components. 
> 
> On the topic of Rhythmbox, I do not have too many problems with its
> plugins list (or at least the type of plugins it attracts). They tend
> to offer small additions that could indeed be represented by single
> check boxes in the program's Preferences. It would be good to see
> those moving straight into the Preferences dialog, though, and the
> idea of them being plugins abstracted to avoid the confusion of that
> term (though still present under the hood). That they are plugins and
> not built in to the program's core should be of no importance to the
> end user. Granted, there would have to be a user interface miracle to
> fit that type of extensible interface in without looking and feeling
> horrendous, but I'm hopeful. It could be an interesting experiment! 
> Even just being an extra tab in Preferences (instead of a new dialog
> as it is now) could do the job fine.

I was reluctant to use popups initially and was thinking if I should use
tabs. Banshee has tab for configuring plugins. I looked at both the
styles and personally found that the magical [dis]appearing of the
configure tab to be more confusing and not as appealing as I thought
initially.  Purely a personal opinion, though.

> 
> Bye,
> -Dylan McCall
> 
> On Nov 17, 2007 7:26 AM, Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> wrote:
>         
>         On Fri, 2007-11-16 at 11:38 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote: 
>         <snip>
>         > Maybe 95% of the plugins of evo should not be displayed as
>         plugins. They
>         > should either be preferences in the standard preferences
>         dialog, or they
>         > should be enabled anyway. 
>         
>         
>         Totem and Rhythmbox have a number of "hidden" plugins that
>         take care of
>         core functionality, and are never shown in the UI, but allow
>         splitting
>         at the code level.
>         
>         > This is not only true for evo, rhythmbox has the same issue
>         (although 
>         > there are less plugins there)
>         
>         
>         Most of Rhythmbox' plugins should be preferences indeed, and
>         it would be
>         pretty trivial to have them be so. For example, the iPod, MTP
>         removable
>         media plugins, and the store plugins (Jamendo, and Magnatune)
>         could be 
>         activated/disabled via a source selection that would allow you
>         to
>         disable some sources ("[ ] Show Play for Sure device in the
>         sources").
>         
>         http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=484435
>         
>         The cover art display in Rhythmbox could be a "show cover art"
>         tickbox
>         instead as well.
>         
>         http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497665
>         
>         
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-- 
Sankar P