Re: application class thoughts

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 11:16 AM, Colin Walters <walters verbum org> wrote:
>
> The most important thing is to implement the application menu,
> offering at least global options like Quit, New Window, About.  And we
> want to experiment with moving e.g. Copy&Paste in there, which could
> get us to the point where basic applications wouldn't need a
> per-window menu.

Ok so in terms of portability to other systems - I took a quick look
at the docs for the Windows 7 jump lists (roughly in the same space),
and I tried to find the MacOS X docs for what happens when you right
click on a dock item, but failed (can anyone fill me in?)

Basically for Windows 7 (
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd378460(VS.85).aspx )you can
list a few different kinds of things "Frequent", "Tasks".  It should
be relatively straightforward to have a GtkAction map to a Win7 Task.
Supporting the "Frequent" section might be possible to do through
GtkRecentManager; if an app uses that we map it to SHAddToRecentDocs
and then I think the Win7 shell will pick that up.

For Mac, it appears as far as I can tell that apps can extend the Dock
menu with basically arbitrary menuitems, including submenus.  But a
GtkAction could go in that menu.  Supporting submenus would need
custom API.

My brief take here is that if we just expose GtkAction we can do a
common subset of both of these things, and most importantly for free
software =) we will work better in GNOME3.