On 22/05/2013 08:43, Stephan Aßmus wrote:
Hi, I am completely with Axel on everything he said. But why don't we focus on the fact that the proposal would accomodate the use-case where people want to organize their deskbar menu themselves, and it would also accomodate the use-case where people couldn't care less about having to do that. Since obviously the first group has no problem tweaking options, they will surely find the option to disable the automatic menu generation and how to place links themselves, while it's a good idea to make the automatism the default for those users who don't want to spend time configuring.
Yup, I agree that getting customisation right is really the key thing. The ideal solution would allow users to customise the menu placement of package-provided symlinks, whilst still being cleaned up nicely on uninstall and retained across upgrades. It's not clear to me the current proposal would provide those elements.
If the above could be done cleanly (I don't have any implementation ideas I'm afraid!) then it's a fairly moot point whether the default positioning is categorized or not. On iOS, adding a new app just goes to a blank space but it's easy to drag it straight into a categorised folder if you want. One can imagine someone with lots of games wanting "puzzles", "racing", etc but a more casual user just "games" is sufficient. The choice of "sensible" categories is quite dependent on the installed set of applications, which is a problem if the categories are decided and fixed up-front.
Simon
