Re: A few general questions

[Ben FrantzDale <bfrantzdale hmc edu>]

On 06 Mar 2001 21:08:52 -0600, Len Philpot wrote:
> On Monday 05 March 2001 22:21, you wrote
> 
> > The Gnome icons all come at 48x48. I made a bunch of large
> > (192x192) icons and put them at www.cs.hmc.edu/~ben/icons/ I'm
> > not sure why what you've got problems with ugly icons unless
> > you'r scaling them to above 48x48... They should scale pretty
> > smoothly down.
> 
> Well, what was happening was that the icons in a drawer were 
> getting scaled up to 48x48. Apparently, you can't display an 
> icon at its _actual_ size if that's different from the size 
> that's "supposed" to be used (I guess). I was trying to use a 
> 16x16 icon in the drawer, since there's no need for anything 
> bigger. However, I finally gave up and used a 48x48 at its 
> actual size. It looks better (obviously) that a smaller one 
> scaled up, but it's still ugly to me in that it's about 4x too 
> big.


Yuck. I've never used drawrs but now I see what you mean. I run with a
24 pixel panel, but the drawer is still 48 pixels thick.

> It seems there's no end to how big interface objects have/will 
> become in gnome. I'd much rather give the extra screen real 
> estate to the client area of a window rather than all widgets 
> surrounding it. Otherwise, you gain nothing with higher 
> resolution and larger screen sizes - Everything just gets bigger.


I agree that a lot of things in Gnome are bigger than they need to be...
I'm not completely sure what you mean...

> Is it possible to create a transparent icon?


Transparent icons show up as transparent... why?

> 
> > I completely agree. I'm not sure why it is the way it is. It's
> > not intuitive and just plain frusterating... I suppose the
> > idea is that then you always have access to everything in that
> > you can't delete the link, but that's a lame excuse.... I'd
> > think the user could basicly work with a diff of the
> > menu---that way new sofware would show up, etc. Also, the
> > current behavior means that ``Properties...'' is insensitive
> > for everythign in the menu. That means that you can't find out
> > what the name of the program is without making a copy of the
> > entry onto the panel. That's just silly.
> 
> My opinion is that if it's your "stuff", you should have the 
> freedom to blow it away if you're not careful :)


Yep...

> Therefore, if I'm logged in as Joe_Blow and I can see something 
> on "my" GUI, I should be able to change / delete / add to it as 
> I see fit, as Joe_Blow. However, nothing Joe does to his GUI 
> should have an impact on anyone else. For example, CDE on 
> Solaris: log in as root and delete all the front panel icons and 
> such. Then log in as someone else and they're still there (for 
> them). The reverse also holds true. That's how it should be, 
> IMO. root should really have no influence on any other user's 
> interface, unless it's set up in /etc/skel as a *initial 
> default*. If you really want to clamp down, just chmod away 
> their permissions to do anything, but that's not real fair.


This sounds like a better behavior. What do other people think? Why is
the behavior as it is? I know users can create their own menus but
wouldn't it make more sense to allow users to configure the main menu
for themselves?

--Ben