[33] in Athena User Interface
Re: Task list
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Winship)
Fri May 12 14:10:29 2000
Message-Id: <200005121811.OAA01746@twelve-monkeys.helixcode.com>
To: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
Cc: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 12 May 2000 13:20:30 EDT."
<200005121720.NAA19060@hikari-no-ken.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 14:11:55 -0400
From: Dan Winship <danw@helixcode.com>
From the task list:
> It will probably also be
> done as it own separate applet, rather than as modifications to the
> gnome menu.
There are some problems with this approach: the normal GNOME menu is
not an applet, it's part of the panel, and that gives it some special
powers. I started writing an Athena menu applet a few months ago, in
/mit/gu/gnash/. I forget exactly how it broke, but I think one problem
was that you couldn't press on the icon then and drag into the menubar.
It's possible that this is fixable though: I didn't know much Gtk at
the time.
[Gnash also includes code to parse the rather interesting Dash menu
definition file format. You may or may not have use for that. (I
figured that allowing the fl's to only maintain a single menu file
during the transition period would be a win.) It also has some hacked
tooltip code to allow for big dash-style tooltips. (GtkTooltip doesn't
deal well with very large, or preformatted tips).]
> 1. A local patch to the Gnome menu is likely to require a lot more
> maintanence (and thus greater cost) than a local applet. (ie, we
> want to ship a 2.0 panel, which will have a completely different
> Gnome menu, but will still support our Athena Menu Applet).
But the look, feel, and feature set of the built-in panel menus are a
moving target, so the old Athena Menu Applet would not match the new
GNOME menu. You're likely to have to continually steal code from the
panel to make it keep working "right". (At the moment, it doesn't deal
with non-default panel sizes, for instance, and it would be nice if
there were icons in the menus for the programs that had them.)
OTOH, there isn't any nice way to make a dynamically-changeable menu
in the existing panel menu framework. So the applet may turn out to be
the best (or only) answer.
> One of the major problems that users have voiced (on the Athena
> Survey, and other places) is that it is too hard to find things on
> Athena. By supporting lockers, users would have only the
> courseware (and other things) that they want in their menu at any
> time.
That needs to be thought out a bit. The (il)logical extension of it
would be that "Netscape" wouldn't appear in the menu until after the
user typed "add infoagents".
-- Dan
