Re: Gnome Office, Bonobo and other apps

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 04:08:32PM +0100, Jean Brefort wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have started developing applications related to chemistry (GChemPaint
> and Gnome Crystal) some years ago, using the gtk+ and gnome libs with
> the hope I'll be able one day to incorporate data inside Abiword and
> other gnome apps using Bonobo.
> I could do it in gnumeric-1.0 (but the data were not saved) but never in
> abiword, which would be much more interesting.
> I'd like to know if there are plans to use Bonobo embedding (may be I
> can help).

With Gnome2 BonoboEmbeddable went away, so Gnumeric-1.2 can no
longer embed things.  1.2 did add support for Gnumeric as a
NautilusView but that has not been terribly useful.  In the current
development tree that is disabled because BONOBOUI does not play
well with GtkAction yet.

That doesn't leave a whole lot of functinality.

I'm not terribly concerned by this loss.  The majority of the
functionality seems useless.  Merging menus and toolbars of
different apps seems like a recipe for confusion.  What I'd much
rather see is for an app to support two modes
    - view
    - edit

Edit is the normal state with toolbars and menus.
View would just display the content.

That way apps could just display the embedded content (or even
better a static image previously generated) then activate the
component and launch the real app, in its own window, to edit
things.