[haiku-development] Re: RFC: Packages and the Deskbar menu
- From: Jessica Hamilton <jessica.l.hamilton@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 22 May 2013 10:52:06 +1200
On 22 May 2013 10:39, John Scipione <jscipione@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 6:07 PM, Chris Peel <chrispeel.mail@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> > Regarding this:
> >
> > "99% of user's won't ever want to customize the Deskbar so I wouldn't
> > spend too much time on it."
> >
> > Where does that statistic come from?
>
> I made it up. Okay, maybe categorizing your Deskbar app list is
> important to some, but plenty don't care, they just want their
> computers to work, they want things to be organized and
> understandable. Ingo has limited time, I don't want him wasting it on
> something most people don't care about.
>
> > If users aren't interested in customisation, why is there such a market
> for
> > it? I don't just mean from a GUI perspective - look at the skins and
> cases
> > you can buy for mobile phones.
>
> I am only talking about customization from a GUI perspective.
>
> > Art applications let you draw pictures; photo editing applications let
> you
> > edit photos, and so on. The Apple App Store, Android Marketplace and so
> on
> > all categorize applications perfectly well.
>
> Except when they don't... you are seriously going to tell me that
> Apple and Google have figured out a foolproof categorization system
> for apps? I find that notion to be arrogant and ignorant.
>
> > Would you really expect a single 100-item category called
> "applications"? Of
> > course not - stop trying to be different for no good reason.
>
> I'm not trying to be different for no good reason, I'm trying to be
> different for very good reason, because the status quo on platforms
> that use app categories sucks. What is wrong with a 100 item list? We
> have ways of dealing with a 100 item lists: pagination, scrollbars,
> and search. Yet there's something very wrong with categories, they're
> arbitrary, they're confusing, they make it harder to find your
> applications because they put them in places you don't expect.
I too agree with John. Application categories aren't as prevalent as
they're made out to be. In the App Stores, sure, they exist there (apps are
often in multiple categories, fwiw). But on the actual devices, from my
experience, very rarely. iOS, OS X, Windows, Symbian, Android all make very
sparse use of categories.
As long as the links get created in an easy to manage way, and can be
customised later by the user (re-organising/removing/what have you), that
should be enough. We don't need to overcomplicate something essentially as
simple as creating a few symlinks.
As for the abundance of categories on Linux, which people like to cite,
perhaps this is because there are a thousand apps all doing essentially the
same thing for every "category" of app you can think of.
Jessica
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