my shortlist of GNOME wishes

["Dirk-Jan C. Binnema" <bulkmail dds nl>]

Hi there,

Somehow, it has suddenly become quite acceptable to come up with GNOME
wishes... No
more "we accept patches"-answers ;-)

These are some of my pet-wishes. Some are quite easy to implement, some
others are
a bit harder.

Cheers.
    Dirk-Jan.



GNOME Foot Menu
---------------
 - It would be nice being able to bind the beloved Windows-key on PC
 keyboards to the Foot menu
    - Is there some easy way to invoke the foot menu when doing right-clicks
    on the desktop?


GNOME Helpbrowser
-----------------
The GNOME Helpbrowser could be a much more valuable tool:
    - An in-page 'Find' function
    - A cross-document find function (I agree this is a *lot* harder)

 - As a more ambitious, but not too hard project, there could be a way
    to browse tarballs of HTML files, with some agreed-upon index file;
    There's a lot of freely available documentation on the web on stuff
    like ODBC, OpenGL, W3-docs, RFCs etc. It would be great to be able
    to browse those from within the GNOME helpbrowser, and adding new
    docs could be as simple as dropping a tarball in some documentation dir.

    It wouldn't hurt to take a look at MS's Help Browser.


GNOME Error
-----------
Users would be helped a lot with more indications from GNOME something's
gone wrong. E.g. when a user selects a non-existing app in the foot menu,
the app doesn't start, but no message is given to the user. I'd like to
see a dialog box 'Your app couldn't be found....bla bla' and some shortcut
keys to the menueditor, 'gfind' and the file editor.

A set of Gnome-Error routines in Gnome-libs would be nice to keep things
uniform.



Gnome File Dialog
-----------------
I know this has come up before, but IMHO the GtkFileDialog is not really
sufficient for end-user apps. I think there should be a richer dialog, with
at least file type filtering. I'd say we leave the GtkFileDialog nice and
spartan as it is, and put the extra's in some GnomeFileDialog.

Another nice feature in a FileDialog are standard directories. In a dialog
to, say, open some pixmap, it would be very nice if it offered some
shortcuts
to user-defined dirs with pixmaps. Same for sounds, fonts etc.

Maybe some funky GMC Bonobo component would do....


GNOME Panel Robustness
----------------------
Some apps crash GNOME or even X. When this happens and I restart X/GNOME,
all my nicely configured panels, applets etc. are returned into their
default setting. It would be nice to return to the last known-good setting.
(or is there something like this already)