[263] in Athena User Interface
Re: Program chooser & list o' lockers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Tibbetts)
Wed Jul 5 22:55:57 2000
Message-Id: <200007060255.WAA13638@hikari-no-ken.mit.edu>
To: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
cc: aui@MIT.EDU, tibbetts@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 05 Jul 2000 18:52:20 EDT."
<200007052252.SAA251882@whack-a-mole.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 22:55:53 -0400
From: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
Great idea. We are not going to do it as part of AUI.
I might suggest that you modify this mail and send it to the
appropriate GNOME list (gnome-gui might be appropriate). I think that
such a widget might well get into GNOME and be used. If it is well
accepted we might even modify it to do the right thing with lockers.
As much as I would like to do new development on GNOME, I don't think
we have sufficient resources. More importantly, I don't think that
such a widget would be as useful if it were not used in non-Athena
GNOME software.
tibbetts
On 7/5 you wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
-*- http://www.mit.edu/~tibbetts -*- finger tibbetts@monk.mit.edu -*-
