Re: [Usability] File menu applet

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

On Sun, 2004-08-01 at 20:54, Alan Horkan wrote:

> >
> > Does this use a "common bookmark spec" I have heard mention of (unifying
> > nautilus, ephy, other bookmarks)?
> 
> Besides my complaining about it?
> Where else might you have heard about it?
> (I'm hoping you'll suggest a mailing list and a rough timeframe I can search)

First off I would like to point out the web and file bookmarks are for
different targets so unifying them all does not make sense.

Unifying Nautilus and File selector bookmarks makes perfect sense and
I'm in the middle of implementing this myself in Nautilus and I should
have it done shortly.


> I had a quick look on FreeDekstop.org but didn't see anything
> http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/Home
> 
> > Does such a beast exist?
> 
> I really hope so, it would be useful to have some global 'Common
> Bookmarks' then applications gThumb could have a subfolder with imported
> Nautilus bookmarks, and vice versa.  Epiphany has a fairly unusual way of
> doing bookmarks so I'm not exactly sure how they might fit in (and I'm
> firmly sticking to Mozilla Seamonkey).
> 
> I suspect the idea has been suggested before but been mooted becuase they
> didn't think about it long enough to see that it could be done in
> a relatively clean and organised way.
> 

The problem is the GTK File Selector cause its mutli-platform and cause
it has no dependencies on other libs for things like XML processing can
only use a very simple file format in a well known place to it. It uses
~/.gtk-bookmarks for this and I am making Nautilus use this file for its
bookmarks too. Theres no reason why other GTK or Gnome apps cant use
this file too for non-web bookmarks.

Its a sub optimal solution cause we cant use things like GConf for this
and therefore we wont have any decent notification (ie File Selector
cant notify Nautilus windows when user has added/removed bookmarks
there). Long term solution would be to have a metadata server (basically
an embeddable DB accessed by DBUS) to store and notify bookmarks and
other metadata as needed (it could also form a common backend for things
like GConf, Medusa, Storage, Evolution Data Server and other such
systems - should be able to do away with a few daemons in the process).

jamie.