My impression of .8

[Federico David Sacerdoti <dfs1 cec wustl edu>]

This is a long one too, I apologize again.

This desktop is starting to pull together. I mean it. A majority of the
bugs I found in .7 have been addressed and fixed. I cant imagine how hard
the coders must be working now.

Here are my impressions of .8 after using it for a little while.

gmc:
-the "rescan" button is exactly what I had in mind. Im happy to see it
there.

-Something I dont understand: If you try to paste a file path or ftp site
in gmc's location bar with the middle mouse (X paste) it wont work. No
action is taken by gmc to address the new location. If you *type* the same
information, however, gmc works as expected and moves to the new location.
I wonder if this is the intended behavior here.

-I might have liked the kind of upturned folder icons in .7's left tree
pane better than the current ones. Im not sure- they were more fun and
less serious than .8's all-90deg-angle folder icons. Its really just an
asthetic thing. 

games:  

-In tetris (Gnometris), I am a firm believer in the pieces scrolling down
smoothly when the <down arrow> is pushed. Currently the pieces fall to the
floor like rocks at the slighest touch of the button. My opinion of Tetirs
stems from playing for hours on Nintendo's gameboy in in the long years of
junior high. It was in those days that the "right" tetris version was set
for my generation. It looks great however, and its still fun to play in
its current form.

gnumetric:  
-Would it be possible for gnumetric to "brand" the files that
it saved? In that way saved spreadsheets would inculde the gnumetric mime
type, or file extension, or whatever is necessary to launch them from the
file manager. In fact, what Im asking about is really a small bit of
information stored in the file about who it "belongs" to. I know that this
meta data is addressed to some extent by mime types, but I wonder if a
stronger association between file/app would be usefull.

I tried performing a standard "file" command on a gnumeric-generated
spreadsheet and it reported that the file was created in 1969. In a way
its sort of cool that it does that. 

And then the biggest question:  

-What is the official GNOME word processor? I have just started coding a
web site with gEdit, and that program kicks ass for what it was intended
for: an extensible, easy to use, low frustration text editor. But its not
quite the "write my resume" program for GNOME. Ive tried Corel's
WordPerfect for Linux, and I hate it. Theres no doubt in my mind that I
will ever want to use that thing.

Is there a WP project in the works, one with the quality and dedication of
Gnumetric? Id give my little finger to have a word killer in front of me
right now.

Its really something to think about after a good stable release of GNOME. 
There are more basic issues pertaining to the desktop being worked out
right now, and I know that they are the most important tasks at hand. But
an accepted GNOME/GTK word processor will have to be created; there is
almost no arguing this.


Take care,
-FDS