Thoughts & suggestions

[Loban Amaan Rahman <loban enigma caltech edu>]

Hello all,
I've compiled a little list of thoughts and suggestions on gnome. I thought
I'd share them ...

(1) How is the gnome-panel implemented widget-wise? It would seem to me
that it ought to be no more than a slightly-modified toolbar widget. What's
with the "tiles" for the buttons. I don't like them because

	(a) They are independent of gtk-themes. So whenever I change themes
	I have to manually change the tiles if they don't match. 
	(b) If I turn tiles off, it looks better, but wouldn't it be nice
	if the buttons acted just like toolbar buttons (ie. you could
	set the buttons to be permanently relieved or just relief on
	mouse over - thus unifying the panel with the rest of the desktop.

(2) I know GMC is being replaced, but I hope the new file manager fixes
the way GMC uses up memory. I mean, when I start up gnome, GMC uses < 2 MB.
I use the file manager for a while. And then close all open windows. GMC
now uses > 10 MB. Either it's a memory leak or GMC likes caching a lot of
info, probably the latter. But their ought to be a limit! I turned off
all the caching options in the preferences menu but it doesn't seem to
help.

(3) Glade is kool. However, it would be nice if it had the GtkEventBox
widget in the palette bar.

(4) Menu editing could be implemented in the panel menu itself. Right
now we can copy launchers from the menu to the panel and vv, but a nice
feature would be to add or remove menu items by dragging items from
the desktop or gmc into the menu, or right-clicking on a menu item and
choose delete. KDE, I noticed, also has a nifty feature where it could
dynamically generate menues that display your entire directory structure,
starting either from root or your home directory. 

(5) There are several kinds of GTK themes - pixmap, plain gtkrc, engine,
etc. Pixmap ones may look pretty but are slower and memory-hungrier. There
is no easy way to find out what type a particular gtk theme is. I'd like
to be able to know.

(6) I've been comparing KDE icons and Gnome icons recently. I don't
mean to complain or start flames, but it seemed the KDE icons tended
to look prettier. This is NOT because the Gnome icons are just ugly,
rather, the KDE icons have two things going for them: 

	(a) They contain a lot of bright, primary colors, that stand
	out. Always good. Gnome icons, I've noticed, go for a greater
	variety of colors, but have too much of the duller kind.
	(b) KDE icons have dark, black, outlines. This makes the icon
	more well-defined. Gnome icons have that "shadow" thing, but
	need to be outlined everywhere with nice dark lines. 

I'm mainly referring to the stock icons, But this is really a very
secondary thing.

(7) There are literrally TONS of gnome-apps out there. I mean its
amazing! BUT, I don't see very many development tools for gnome. I mean
there are a few: gIDE, glade, etc. But most are quite young. I think that
by the time gnome reaches 2.0 (or even better, by 1.4), it should have
a solid gnome-devel-tools package to accompany the basic gnome-core and
gnome-libs and gnome-devel. The package should have, at minimum, a fully
functional IDE with integrated GUI, sort of like Visual Studio or Kdevelop.
This, i think, is important than say, Gnome Office. Why? Well, a good
development environment will encourage people and companies to develop
for gnome. I think that everytime a new release of gnome/gtk comes out, 
a corresponding release of the devel tools should accompany. The
devel tools should always at the same level as the libraries themselves.

(8) There should be a way for gnome apps that ideally require root access
to request the root password in a simple popup dialog which contains
a field to enter the root password or run the app as non-root. That way
we won't have to manually su to root and run the app. Programs that this
would be useful for or GnoRPM, Update Agent, Disk Management Tool, etc.


Phew! That's it. I might have repeated stuff people have already mentioned,
or might have already fixed/implemented. For those, sorry!


	= L