Re: Application selection dialog

[Magnus Bergman <magnus bergman observer net>]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:18:27 +0100
Marvin Raaijmakers <marvin nospam gmail com> wrote:

> I think that at the moment there is no nice way for the user to choose
> an application. GTK has a dialog for selecting files so why not add a
> dialog to GTK for selecting an application? Some application allow the
> user to fill in the command of a program or also have a "Browse..."
> button which will show a file selection dialog for browsing for a
> binary. But that "Browse..." button is a MS Windows solution. For
> those who have never worked with MS Windows: it has a very user
> unfriendly application menu, which in short is a mess. So that is why
> MS Windows uses the browse button. On the free desktop however we have
> a very nice standardized system for building a (categorized)
> application menu, so that is not hard for the user to start an
> application. However this nice standard is currently only used for
> such a menu. So my idea is to use the application tree, that is used
> for the app menu, for the "application selection dialog".
> I have implemented such a dialog in my application keyTouch. For a
> screenshot of it go to: http://keytouch.sf.net/screenshots.php . It
> would be nice if such a dialog could be part of GTK and that the user
> will be able to select applications by the free desktop way instead of
> the MS Windows way.

I very much agree that having all applications in a menu is user
unfriendly. But luckily there is an application called Application
Finder[1] which presents all applications in a more sensible way (but
I dislike the name since it implies that the applications are somehow
lost). It can be used to drag applications to launchers and such too.
Apart from that there is a also a similar dialog in gnome-panel then
adding a launcher. You might be interested in extracting that and
putting it in a separate library?

[1] http://www.xfce.org/projects/xfce4-appfinder/