[haiku-development] Re: RFC: Packages and the Deskbar menu
- From: "Chris Peel" <chrispeel.mail@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 21 May 2013 15:07:45 -0700 (PDT)
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?
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.
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
categorise applications perfectly well.
Would you really expect a single 100-item category called "applications"? Of
course not - stop trying to be different for no good reason.
Oh, and Terminal goes in Utilities, and Magnify goes in Accessories. Easy.
—
Sent from Mailbox for iPhone
On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 10:54 PM, John Scipione <jscipione@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 4:08 PM, Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx> wrote:
>> On 05/21/2013 09:44 AM, Humdinger wrote:
>>> How about a checkbox "Add shortcut to Deskbar" in the "installer/pm-
>>> manager/app-shop" application we'll have? In the window you see before
>>> actually installing an app, so you can quickly decide on an app-by-app
>>> basis.
>>
>> That was my initial idea as well. But thinking about it, I wouldn't use that
>> feature at all. I simply want all installed applications to be easily
>> reachable via the menu and I don't want to bother with maintaining anything
>> in there at all. Well, maybe aside from "Favorites" category for
>> applications I use often, but I'd use LaunchBox for that purpose anyway. I
>> would think that the majority of users would be happy with a completely
>> automated mechanism. at least, if there are better categories than there are
>> now.
>>
>> For users who really can't live with the predefined categories or for
>> purists who only want to see the applications they actually use the option
>> to disable the auto-generated part would allow them to do whatever they
>> like.
> 99% of user's won't ever want to customize the Deskbar so I wouldn't
> spend too much time on it.
>>> The sorting in those defined categories is one thing that has been
>>> requested a lot in the past. Not everyone would like that, so it should
>>> be an option in the Deskbar preferences.
>>
>> There seems to be a misunderstanding. We do already have four categories.
>> The question merely is whether we want to refine them. And yes, we want to.
>> :-) Since we have a lot less available software I don't think it makes a lot
>> of sense to introduce multi-level categories (e.g. Internet/Chat), but ten
>> or so top-level categories should work just fine.
>>
>> Regarding the ambiguity argument John brought up, I don't think that's an
>> argument for not having more categories at all. The first time you want to
>> start a certain application you might have to check two categories. The next
>> time you'll know where to find it and you'll be faster then having to find
>> it in a long list.
> I might be alone here not wanting app categories, and that's okay. If
> we build in the notion of categories to the package manager now, maybe
> in the future we can move Deskbar to a Gnome3-esque interface where
> you start with a paginated list of all applications and then you can
> then drill down either by searching or by category (e.g.
> Internet/Chat) to get a better app list until you pick the one you
> want.
> That being said, I'm against app categories on principle as they are
> so arbitrary "Accessories", "Utilities", etc. and there's always the
> odd app that defies categorization. Each app should stand on it's own,
> not be relegated to a category. Where does Terminal go for instance?
> What about Magnify, where does it get categorized?
> Stop thinking of apps as belonging to one group or another because
> they don't, each app is unique and fulfills the purposes of the
> author's intent. Even the categories we have now are arbitrary, what's
> a Demo, what's a Deskbar Applet? There's no definition it's all just
> arbitrary. This would also neatly solve the debate of what to do with
> non-package managed apps since they'd go in the same flat list as
> everything else.
> I call for just one category, "Applications", it's the only one that
> makes sense.
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