[261] in Athena User Interface
Program chooser & list o' lockers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Wed Jul 5 18:52:37 2000
Message-Id: <200007052252.SAA251882@whack-a-mole.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 18:52:20 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
So I mentioned in a previous mail the need for a dialog where you get
to browse your Favorites menu (and maybe your panel icons and other
menus or whatever) and pick one or more programs. This would be
useful for session management, gmenu, gmc (for opening files of
unknown type) and probably other places. A simple file browser will
not quite work, as other information, like icon, description,
pre-command test command, etc. are often relevant, and must be
imported. Also, navigating the file tree is not something users find
easy to do, especially since the menu system will shield them from the
actual locations of many things.
Further complicating things (but not terribly so) is Athena locker
support. Users are likely to session-manage programs that are already
on their menus, but *might* want to run an obscure program at startup
that's on a menu they don't want on their Favorites list.
Obviously, for adding things to your Favorites menu, simply listing
the things you already have there won't suffice. Therefore, I think
the program chooser should allow you to browse arbitrary lockers that
you *don't* have on your menu. It's easy enough to do this if you
just ask the user to supply the name of the locker.
So, I think we will need to modify the existing Gnome file and/or
program choosers to serve these purposes.
Another independent but related problem is the answer to the question,
"How do I know the name of the locker to add?"
Especially with cross-locker menus, how is one supposed to know to
add, say, "communications" and not "internet" or "instant-messaging"?
Two solutions have been suggested so far: documentation and
integration.
The first would involve creating a web page, not unlike the current
"What Runs Where" page. Instead of listing individual programs, this
new page would list lockers, sorted by category and presumably with
some short description of purpose. Any time a locker maintainer
created a submenu (perhaps with prompting) they would send mail to the
central maintainers and ask to be added (if they wanted their locker
to be made publicly available in this manner).
Sometimes, locker maintainers might be lame. If they create menus,
but don't tell us about them, a third party (like say someone in SIPB,
or OLC) might come across the menu and tell us about it. Also, anyone
can create a menu for stuff in any locker (though they'd have to store
it externally if they don't have write permission). Locker
maintainers could also write a description and request to be added to
a particular category, saving the root maintainers the bother of
trying to figure out what a given locker was for.
I don't think the tree-of-lockers would be a horribly and unmanagably
large, and I'd be willing to try to do a proof-of-concept tree to show
this, if people disagree. Once established, it would probably not
need to be frequently updated - only when locker menus are born, die,
or are completely rechartered. I think that cross-locker menus will
be much more of a time drain, because there we (or whoever is
maintaining them) actually has to track individual programs.
I've talked with some non-Course-6 users about this, and they agree
that such a thing would be eminently useful. I suppose there's
probably not much disagreement that we have to have a list of locker
menus *somewhere*; the question is whether to do it in HTML or as part
of the interface itself.
While it would be more work to set up at first, it's no more
time-intensive to maintain the list as a system-wide configuration
file than as a web page. And, we would get the added functionality of
being able to browse menus and programs in lockers you don't have
added. This is the whole *point* of gmenu; elsewhere, many users
would prefer not to have to add menus to see what's in them, and would
also prefer not to have to type in the name of a locker (though being
able to would be very useful).
Usably yours,
Beland
