Re: UI Roadmap: Round Two

[John Keller <gnome johnkeller com>]

On 06/07/2010 11:02 PM, Allan Day wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Thanks to everyone who showed up for the meeting today. Much of it was
> taken up with tangential matters, so I'm not going to recount the event
> here.
> 
> The important thing is that we agreed on a series of items which have
> been added to the UI Roadmap [1]. I'd like to start publicising the
> list. Before I do, however, we need to make sure that we're certain
> about the list. So, please look over each of the items in the roadmap
> and say if you disagree with them or think they need to be changed in
> some way. This is your chance to object! ;)

Well, besides several bugs on the "proposed items" list which I'd love
to see moved up to the main list ;-) (the old case where "bugs that
affect me always seem more important"), I'd like to mention another.

In a case similar to "Fix drag and drop in list view" (bug 310819 on the
UI Roadmap), there's another problem with windows which are full of items.

It's not possible to right-click on the background of the window
representing a folder to get a contextual menu for that folder.
Likewise, it's not possible to start a drag-select operation. The
problem comes from the fact that all columns are selection targets for
the item, so a window full of items only allows the user to click on
visible items in the list.

This needed to be addressed in GTK+, but seems dead on the vine. If I
remember correctly, the solution was going to be the ability to tag
columns in TreeView as unselectable, so events would fall through to the
container.

The Nautilus bug for this is 94618 (opened in 2002), the GTK+ bug is 350618.

New functionality is sexier to work on, but I hope that bringing these
bugs up during this cycle will renew interest in them.

> The exciting news is that the effort already seems to attracting some
> interest from developers. Thanks to those who've already contributed
> patches. :)

Very cool, looking forward to see where this all leads!

- John