On 23/05/2013 09:36, Stephan Aßmus wrote:
Hi, On 23.05.2013 09:53, Alexander von Gluck IV wrote:As David said above, is the applications menu supposed to contain every application ever installed, or is it supposed to contain the ones you actually use?That is exactly the question. And I think the file system layer shows too much other files. So I want an easy to access layer which shows *all* installed applications, just one icon per app. This is what I have always used the Applications menu in BeOS for. For access to frequently used applications, I would be using LaunchBox or a new "Pin to Deskbar" feature in Deskbar itself (replacing LaunchBox).
This is perhaps the crux of the issue. I disagree that the "filesystem layer shows too many files" - the deskbar list on BeOS comes from a well-defined folder of symlinks, and the user is free to manage the files in that folders to completely control the number and position of those items. This is much the same philosophy that is applied to emails - for any problem involving arranging things in a hierarchy, Tracker is a well-suited and well-understood way to do that.
In a mutli-user and packagefs future it may not be simple (or even possible) to use the same method for organising Deskbar entries. I suppose there could be a virtual filesystem that provides a merged view of all the sources of application symlinks. I'm still not quite clear on how the proposal would work, but I wouldn't want to have to copy an entire auto-generated hierarchy of links somewhere writeable in order just to move one entry into a different folder.
I'm not really for adding an option for flat or categorised list - partially it's been justified by my "vote" for a flat list; but I realise now that's not really what I want. For Deskbar I would just want a list that's easily customisable - for me that means a Tracker view of a folder. Then it makes sense to me that by default new applications should just show up in the root, and the user can move them. People who have 64 applications will probably already have organised them into categories that make sense for them, and so adding the 65th is just a case of installing the package and then moving the link where they want it. For proponents of auto-categorisation - what happens when someone installs 64 "Games"?
Saying all that, my ideal launching interface is just a type-ahead searchable list of everything installed, sorted by recent use. I disagree with John that Gnome3/Unity is unquestionably a step forward; like Ingo I believe it looks like the tablet use-case had too much influence in the design, and it would kind of jar with most of Haiku, where the OS stays out of the way as much as possible. The type-ahead launching is one thing I really do like about Unity though. A subtle type-ahead launching interface (a bit like spotlight in OSX but without trying to do a billion other things at the same time) would be perfect for me. That has very little to do with the question of "how do packages deal with the Deskbar menu" though!
Simon
