feature idea (graphical pipes?)

[Olaf Grüttner <O Gruettner tu-bs de>]

I just had an idea for a cool feature for the gnome-desktop.

graphical pipes !!!

while on the console it is easily possible to design a useful pipe with
find | tail | sort | uniq | grep | lpr  and so on .... :-) it is not
possible to do that in a rather graphical user-friendly way.

So here is my suggestion: have an icon sitting on the desktop. From out
of gmc you drag a file to the icon and the pipe is processed according
to the will of the user:
.doc - files from word are processed to xml
.c - files will be processed to have the #include -files automatically
included
.ps - files are send to the printer, like in the printer applet
.lyx - files will be translated into tex-files
.xls - files are automatically deleted :)

... and whatever the user wants.

well the output will be put onto the desktop. The pipe will be
extension- and name-sensitive and if you drag multiple files other
actions can happen like producing diff-files on .txt files or appending
files on .tex files.

As long as the pipe is working it could show an animation or do whatever
you like.

how about an install or patch pipe? Drag a patch file onto the icon and
...

-- 
Olaf Grüttner
O.Gruettner@tu-bs.de