Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 9th Dec 2003 22:48 UTC
A few weeks ago we published an article titled "The Great Mac OS X 10.4 Wish List", detailing a few personal wishes for the next version of OSX. Later I learned that quite a few Apple engineers read the article and so it felt good that the time spent writing the article was not just a voice in the void. A reader emailed me a few days ago asking me to do the same for other OSes and DEs. So here is my personal wish-list for a future version of Gnome. Please tell us about your own Gnome wish list in the comment section provided.
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This is just the pit of an iceberg that Eugenia has mentioned here. There are even more trivial things such as copying stuff from FTP to your harddisk that doesn't work properly. Try connecting to ftp://ftp.gnome.org and copy a subdir with mixed entries (files and directories) to your system and you get something like (copying file 87 of 12) and wonder why it's copying more files than existing. Or if you copy large dirs which are for example 15mb then you will only get 6mb of it and the rest will be copied as 0byte files.
I am not a friend of adding all these bindings to GNOME, on the one hand it offers the possibility for authors to write programs in the language they prefer but on the otherhand it makes things more complex. She has mentioned that things as GTK are really slow but please thing in the future, as soon as you add more libraries, more bindings, more languages into the middle of GNOME as soon you make the general operation become slower (noticable during execution and startup time).
A bunch of things inside GNOME can be fixed or cleaned up but what benefits does fixing stuff and cleaning up things give one when the supplied framework of the broken thing is not optimal in first case. It's like fixing a bit here, a bit there and something on another place but it's no optimal solution. A better solution would be to to trash that framework and go for a better one.
Nautilus is an example itself here - it feels nothing complete but nothing half. Same for Evolution which is NOT following the GNOME HIG here (which raises the question what purpose the HIG has at the end) the Toolbar (to give an example) is still not following the Menu&Toolbar preferences system (Text only, Icons only, Text besides Icons, Text below Icons) and things like this.
Eugenia brought up the user visible/annoying problems which she detected over the months using GNOME, the real technical problems can only be seen by someone who knows the underlaying framework of GNOME.
E.g. it's hard comparing Anjuta/Glade with KDevelop for example because to get an application with the quality of KDevelop you first need to screw (technically/engeneering) at the framework.