Re: Argumentation on GUI design, was: Re: A few thoughts on Gnome.

[Nils Philippsen <nils rhlx01 rz fht-esslingen de>]

On Tue, 18 Aug 1998, Haukur Hreinsson wrote:

> [much deleted here and below]
[ditto]
> Why do people like to crap on the registry concept? So, one company overused
> it and implemented it badly. That's no reason to throw out the idea. Imagine
> if all your settings and preferences were kept on the net (and cached of
> course). You could walk over to a friend's house and sit down at his machine
> and as long as the machine's systems have the required capabilities, you
> could just identify yourself to it, and it would behave like your own box.
> Your hotkeys would work. Your desktop theme would be there. Double clicking
> a jpeg in the file manager would do what it does at home and so forth. (Of
> course, your friend might not have your picture viewer installed, and might
> have a completely different keyboard but these issues do not prevent this
> scheme from being a great convenience tool.)

For having real equal behaviour everywhere you've got to have your home
mounted on the machine your sitting in front of, so this point is moot IMO.
BTW having one centralized database requires the applications to speak the
language the db does, this might a) be a large effort to do with all the
existing apps and b) sometimes not feasible because the db does not fit the
needs of a specific app wrt to configuration. Oh, and sometimes I like run
scripts over configuration files which would disqualify binary db's (you don't
consider having binary db's, do you?) -> then we would have one single ascii
db and I can see no advantage in this.

> 
> I imagine everybody agrees that all this is much easier to implement if the
> data is centralized. I also trust you all know about backups and redundancy.
> 
> >> F: Open new windows by default. Though I do feel that this option
> >> should be configurable, I also feel that it should fallow the by
> >
> ><RANT>
> >IMO this is very sick behaviour. Consider changing to
> >/usr/src/linux/Documentation/isdn from your home (say /home/leareth),
> >which would be ../../usr/src/linux/Documentation/isdn. That's SEVEN new
> >windows. This is not just sick, it's perverted.
> ></RANT>
> 
> I agree. However, this is an unfairly bad example. Surely a directory tree

Take a look at your TeX installation and you'll see unfair examples. This was
not even a gratis probe.

> view would allow one to get from dir a to dir b without opening every
> directory on the path between them.
> 
> >> E: The default menu should be actual directories with real sym
> >> links contained within, ".<appname> files only created when they
> >> become necessary.
> >
> >This would be nice.
> 
> 
> I want the ability to control the order of menu entries and the placement of
> dividers. Directories are ill suited to this function. Therefore I'm
> somewhat against this idea.

The point was not directories but having symlinks instead of real files (which
use disk space) in them if the user hasn't changed settings. Whether using
directories for this purpose is a good idea may be discussed :-)

Nils
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