Re: roadmap discussion

[Nikolai Weibull <mailing-lists epiphany rawuncut elitemail org>]

* Reinout van Schouwen <reinouts gnome org> [Nov 15, 2004 11:40]:
> > Interesting, but perhaps the menu-bar of GNOME applications should
> > be replaced by a panel applet as it is?  Like Mac OS and KDE

> Sure, but that's a much bigger project. A bookmarks applet can be done
> *now* (Nigel Tao already has written one in Python), app menu bars on
> the panel IMO aren't going to come until GNOME 3.0, if at all.

Yes, and we are in a rush...or?  Mending a broken UI with something
half-assed isn't a solution.  It is something that demands a lot of
attention and maintenance, which will be wasted once the real deal is in
place.  Why waste time writing something when there is something better
not much farther off?  I'm not suggesting the Mac OS menu bar, I find it
weird to operate in that manner, but a bookmarks applet to solve the
problem of a stupid bookmarks menu is not better.

I think the whole menu deal is messed up.  Representing a tree, for a
tree is what most people seem to want, with menus and sub-menus is plain
wrong.  sub-menus are a thing of the UI past, everyone wants them
abolished.  They are hard to navigate and hard to visually comprehend.
I don't like having a separate window for my bookmarks, as I only
display one window at a time on my desktop (thank you ratpoison!), but I
can't say I know of a better alternative.

One suggestion would be some kind of hotkey or toolbar item activeted
window that would only display until you selected a bookmark to visit;
kind of like the buffer list in EMACS or Vim or the window list window in
screen.  Furthermore, bookmark categories (or whatever we like to call
them next) would have emblems or some other iconic representation.
Bookmarks would retain their favicons (which, thanks to stupid
webmasters (e.g. freedesktop.org's) and squid, get totally messed up at
my end - no, they're not text/plain; charset=utf-8, they're image/x-icon
(or some other image format) thank you very much) and titles.  One idea
would be to abolish the menu-tree or list-tree UI and use something like
the UI in Nautilus, where one would navigate categories like directories
and bookmarks would act like files.  That would perhaps not be as quick
for every case, but would make the Nautilus browsing idea more pervasive
in the desktop.

> Eventually the backend would be a system wide bookmarks service included
> in evolution-data-server. Peter Harvey is working on that.

OK.  Then perhaps what I suggested above would be easy to implement?

> > Probably not.  Get this right and people will see a reason to use
> > Epiphany.  I use firefox for one reason atm:  keyword bookmarks.  Plus
> > del.icio.us is pretty nice as well.

> So it would be nice if Epiphany came with support for/easy access to a
> social bookmarks system. How would this work, in your view?

Yeah.  Well, with firefox it's easy.  I have one keyword for adding
bookmarks that goes through the nutritious interface to delicious:

m[ark]

which adds the current page to my bookmarks (I get to edit the details
first)

and one for looking up bookmarks:

' <category>

which gets me to my category <category>.  I haven't added one for
searching yet, but that's easy enough.

This is of course not a very intuitive interface (it's too Vi[m]ish),
but I can't really think of an easier one to use nor a better one.

> About keyword bookmarks: see
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157784

Ah, thanks.  Weird that Marco finds them hard to use, I always found the
entries in the drop-down hard to use (especially when I had 15 different
entries).
	nikolai

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