Re: [gnome-love] Start-Menu

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Sun, 2003-05-04 at 10:31, Pablo Baena wrote:
> This discussion made me wonder something. First of all, I really
> support the idea of making the menu more polished (I don't think there
> will be opposition to this, since Gnome 2 faced lots of polishing).
>
> What I wondered is: is there an easy way to add an application to the
> Gnome menu? And by easy I mean a couple of function calls. 

Function calls?  GNOME menu doesn't use function calls - just put your
.desktop file in the right place.  Unfortunately, this right place
differs depending on distro...

It would be great if there was an install-desktop-entry shell script
with a standard interface.  (That would be a good gnome-love project;
check freedesktop.org)

> If not, you should take that in account. I'm all for flexibility, but
> for the average programmer I think there should always be a shortcut
> so one can learn to program with Gnome faster.
>
> Also, I'm saying this because if these things aren't kept in mind from
> the beginning, later it is very hard to simplify the API.

The GNOME API is almost as simple as you can get, given the fact it's
all OO in C.  if you want a really clean API, *dons fire-retardant suit*
check out Mono and GTK#.

> Take for example GConf. Why should I have to learn a complicated way
> of preserving preferences, when that should be much simpler? Because
> it has all those features that I won't use. So then I rebel and make a
> replacement

This is a bad decision.  If there are features in gconf you aren't
using, you are cheating your users.  GConf if complex because the idea
is complex.  You can't be lazy and skimp on the features there-in; that
just cheats your users out of the features they should have.

>  (http://gnomencoder.sourceforge.net/index.html#GeSettings), but I
> lose integrity with the Gnome framework in the process (i.e. I cannot
> use gconf-editor).
>
> This is all because simplification wasn't pursued from the beginning.

No, it's because GNOME provides a very concrete and powerful API.  There
_are_ places simplification could be used, I'll admit that.  But not
when such simplification will fail to meet design goals.

If you want it to be any simpler - either _wrap_ the GNOME API's in
something you like better, so you can have whatever API you want but you
have the full power of the GNOME technologies, or use a different
binding (which is basically wrapping) such as GTKmm, Inti, PyGNOME, or
GTK#.

> Regards! 
>
> -- 
>
> Pablo Baena <pbaena uol com ar>
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.