Re: [Usability] Question: design choice of menubars

[Frans Englich <frans englich telia com>]

On Sunday 19 September 2004 14:50, you wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-09-19 at 14:43 +0000, Frans Englich wrote:
> > Yes, getting KDE/GNOME to support it by themselves is perhaps doable, but
> > making sure applications can be run in the respective environment is of a
> > quite different magnitude, AFAICT.
>
> Mike Owens was doing some work a while ago with KDE to improve their
> global menu, using a protocol basically like the Freedesktop
> Notification spec, so that basically you'd have a panel applet (Menu
> manager) swallowing individual apps' menubars. I don't know what ever
> came of it, but that might be a good place to start.

Yes, and its the only way to solve it, cross-desktop or not, since it involves 
being out-of-process. Implementing it in KDE is as easy as it gets, but no 
idea about GTK, it depends on how well the menubar code is abstracted from 
the API user. Other than that, it's just about agreeing on what X client 
messages and XEmbed semantics to use -- and that's the important part, to do 
the free desktop specification first, so a step back in integration doesn't 
happen, and boring compatability work is not needed later on.


This would be quite fun and not consume that much time, it's on my TODO, just 
like tens of other more important ones..

Cheers,

		Frans