On 21/05/2013 23:52, Jessica Hamilton wrote:
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.
I'm also with John and Jessica here.Lists don't really scale well to large numbers of applications, and I'm also not a fan of categories. In the app stores, they're only really useful in combination with sorting by price, rating or popularity (I want to find a free, popular game). On a user's desktop we don't have to deal with anywhere near the number of applications or the "discovery" use case.
For me, live search is the best option - click a button (perhaps a deskbar replicant), have it list recently used applications with a focussed text box. As you type, applications matching the text appear (again sorted by most recently used first).
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.
Are the package-fs symlinks likely to be pointing to a fixed binary location between package updates? If so the user could copy the symlink out of packagefs into home/config/deskbar and deskbar could be modified to only show one entry per linked-to-application, preferring customised ones over the package-fs ones.
Simon
