feature idea (graphical pipes?)

[Eric Windisch <southpark nni com>]

On Mon, 23 Aug 1999 15:31:36 Olaf Grüttner wrote:
> 
> I just had an idea for a cool feature for the gnome-desktop.
> 
> graphical pipes !!!

Good idea.
 
> 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
> ...

Good idea but wrong solution.  This might work better instead:
1: drag application onto pipe icon
2: pipe application pops up
3: drag application onto "output" field

this could be given   a very user friendly user interface like this:
where Balsa is the application you draged and droped and GMC was using
the Balsa2.png
 _____________________________
|O_Gpipe_________________- v ^|
|                             |
|  [Balsa2.png] ->  [Browse]  |
|    "Input"   "TO" "Output"  |
|                             |
|_________[Done][Next][Cancel]|

This is the perfect interface IMHO, although
unfortunatly it uses the button config that Microsoft 
has made famous, but it is the best implimentation from
a user-friendly standpoint (a list/clist would be better
from the standpoint of an advanced user but gnome's point
is to make it easier right?) perhaps a capplet in gnomecc 
would allow you to switch it to a list view ? :)

If nobody minds it being written in perl/gtk  I can finish an 
application of this sort by the end of  the week (unless I 
don't get my day off this week) ;P

--
 Eric Windisch