[737] in Athena User Interface
Menu system update
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Wed Mar 28 18:12:49 2001
Message-Id: <200103282312.SAA161136@whack-a-mole.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 18:12:43 -0500
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
Ok, I've completed the reorganization of the menus based on feedback
from the last AUI meeting we talked about such things. This includes
the following changes since my last weekly update:
- Check new entries for typos
- Integrate new items into existing structure
- Split graphics into line and image (not edit/view), and separate
out moving picture apps
- Make capitalization consistent
- Add "File Manager" (Nautilus) on top level
- Propagate changes to publicly readable location
I took a broad survey of student-related web sites and added anything
I thought all or almost all undergraduates and/or graduates would need
to access at least once in their MIT careers. I also added a small
number of sites which are immediately useful to the average student
sitting in an Athena cluster, like web.mit.edu listings for food and
transportation, cluster maps, and info on CopyTech and recycling. The
latter two are included because high visibility of these items might
help reduce abuse of Athena printers and help reduce the amount of
recyclable material that ends up in Athena wastebins.
The Academics menu was getting unweildy after adding some
field-specific software from What Runs Where. After asking some
people for advice, I decided "Science and Engineering Tools" was
generally more descriptive than "Simulation and Modeling." I've
clarified the names of the top-level "Academics" and "Communications"
menu to "Academic Courseware" (since only software specific to a class
or useful for administering classes is included here) and "Network
Communications" (as opposed to communications in the journalistic
sense, which would parallel programming, science, etc.).
I've got the following changes as the top priority on my todo list:
- Collapse CD Players and Other Players menus into an intelligent
script that runs the right app for the current platform
- Possibly do the same for audio volume applications
- Make zathrun error message more informative
- Identify which applications need feedback from xalf
- Known: Netscape, Star Office
- Fix icons
- Make icons consistent; also use nice icons from Gnome system
menus
- Move icons in to /mit/aui/menu/icons
- Make a generic "display text" GTK app for use with:
- Renew Authentication
- "Check for waiting mail"
- "Which is my PO Server?"
- /mit/weather/bin/weather
- athinfo
- sysinfo
- Make FTP more helpful
To be able to see the menus, make ~/.gnome/apps a symlink to
/mit/aui/menu/tree. The gtest account should already have this
working, though I haven't been able to test it remotely. Please let
me know if you find any typos or bugs.
Thanks!
Beland
Who will return from the Left Coast on Saturday.
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Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
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