Re: gnome-control-center's future

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo novell com>]

On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 11:32 -0600, Scott Reeves wrote:
> Here is a short overview of the “slab” module in gnome cvs.  For the purposes of integrating this code into the existing gnome-control-center we can view it as providing 2 pieces - shell and tiles.
> 
> SHELL - contains the individual tiles and provides - (pic #1)
> filter
> interactive - as you type it updates the available tiles and groups (pic #2)
> searches on Name, GenericName, and Exec entries in the .desktop file
> can eliminate menu hunting as you just for example type “keyboard” to see what is available. (pic #3)
> even when you know where an item lives (IE menu navigation, not menu hunting) it's actually usually faster to launch item via filter compared to usual menu or mouse navigation. For example just type “fo <enter>” to launch the font capplet. (pic #4)
> 
> groups
> uses libmenu which parses Categories entry in each .desktop file and classifies them into groups according to preferences.menu.  Modified menu file to have 4 groups - “Hardware, Look and Feel, Personal, System”
> clicking on individual group scrolls the right pane to show that set of tiles and highlights the set. (pic #5)
> 
> Common Tasks - reads a gconf key to show list of common tasks. Some tasks launch capplets already contained in the right pane while others launch distro specific things like YaST.
> 
> right pane of tiles, sorted by category.
> 
> 
> TILES
> generated from each .desktop file and show Name, Generic Name, and Icon	
> provide via right click (or Shift-F10) a common menu of actions such as help or upgrade. upgrade for example checks the package management system to see if there is a new version in the repository. (pic #6)
> 
> 
> “slab” module layout and usage.
> mainly consists of 2 libraries, 3 applications that use those libraries
> libtile - provides tile functionality
> libslab - provides generic shell functionality
> control-center - small piece that sets up the control center using libslab
> application-browser  - ignore it for this discussion, sets up the AB on sled using the generic slab/lib* libraries. provides similar functionality with all apps installed on the box as the control-center does with all capplets. (pic #7)
> main-menu - Provides the panel entry that is the main access point in SLED. provides launching point for AB and CC. (pic #8)
> 
> initial thought is that we would want to replace gnome-control-center with slab/control-center and just link against the slab libtile and libslab libraries.
> 
yeah, that is the first step. The main problem though is where to put
the main-menu applet, since it would replace the current menu applet,
and we can't make gnome-panel depend on g-c-c right?

About the slab libs (libtile and libslab), I think it would be nice to
integrate them into existing libraries. libslab is probably better put
in already-existing g-c-c libraries (we have a few), but libtile, what
about proposing it for GTK/libgnome?

Any objection anyone against the GUI?
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo novell com>