[openbeos] Re: suggestions for R1

> these are my suggestions for OBOS R1 (another post for R2 to 
> come...), I hope they may be realized and don't break the OBOS 
> "tradition and look&feel"... :)
> 
> 1) move the Tracker on the left, so the popup menu open towards 
> right;
> 
> 2) move the menu folders (Applications, Games, Preferences, etc.) 
> on the beginning of the menu, and the rest (restart, shutdown, 
> recent applications, etc.) on the last part;
> 

sounds like you're talking about the deskbar here.  these things are 
already user-configurable.  the deskbar can sit on any corner or edge 
of the screen.  it's contenets are configurable _almost_ to the extent 
you'd like them to exist.  if it's default settings you want changed 
then, well, you could always change them in a "marco's slightly 
modified UI" distro.  look at BeOS Max, the structure of the Be menu 
was modified and distributed that way.  personally i've always been 
fond of the defaults here.  upper-right corner, menu items i normally 
use on the bottom of the list.  deskbar btw has been opensource for 
quite some time, much longer than openbeos has been around.  these 
changes, if made, could be put into BeOS R5 too if you wanted to use 
openTracker/openDeskbar.

> 3) have a big control panel which contains ("embeds", like in KDE 
> or Gnome Control Centers) all configuration apps (networking, 
> devices, background, etc.);

i agree with you here that this would be nice.  even a third party app 
could accomplish this.  maybe you've just suggested something that I 
COULD DO!  thanks!  i'll give it a shot. 

> 4) take the GPL'ed code from POle, which is a library for reading 
> OLE streams from files (it could be useful to developers to have 
> such a library shipped with the operating system), and is 
> included in the KOffice cvs tree (but AFAIK it is written in 
> C/C++ only, no Qt or Kde code);
> 

i'm not certain that this is neccesary.  i'm more of a hardware guy 
than software and just don't know much about it, but the previous posts 
seem to say that Be's default messaging capabilities put OLE to shame 
and that if you want to embed an app inside another one, replicants 
really do work wonderfully.  take a look there.

-jared

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