Re: About GNOME / return / duck related question

[Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com>]

--- Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com> wrote:
> There are some things that most people will not
> recognize as being 
> distinct "applications", and which should therefore
> have their help 
> combined into a general "&operatingsystem; Help".
> These include gdm, 
> gnome-panel, Metacity, Nautilus, gnome-screensaver,
> and the various 
> Preferences and Administration tools.

Exactly.
I barely know what gdm is myself.

> If I was having trouble opening an Excel spreadsheet
> in Gnumeric, and I 
> didn't yet know that Gnumeric didn't offer any help
> on opening Excel 
> spreadsheets specifically, I would get a bit annoyed
> if I read through 
> Gnumeric's "Opening a file" help, only to realize
> that it was 
> word-for-word the same as the "Opening a file"
> section in almost every 
> other application.

Indeed.
What I mean is that the stuff on how the filechooser
works should be written once and once only. That's
things like typing in a location, using a bookmark,
and then all the quite cool and advanced features that
some of our users complain because they've not found
them yet, like tab completion and whatever.

That's assuming of course that all apps are using the
standard filechooser -- they are, right? ;)
And that's assuming the filechooser ever gets a help
button.
(Please, somebody, add a help button. The bug for that
is nearing its first birthday.)

Stuff that is specialized to each application, such as
character encoding in Gedit, is of course written for
each app.
(This means that pluggability may need to happen on a
finer level that the single page topic.)

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