OSNews

Eugena, sometimes you'll write things that make so much sense, and sometimes you'll write things that completely blow my mind. This article has a healthy mix of both. Here goes...

Nautilus scripts/addons: Couldn't agree more that these need to be exploited. This could be extremely powerful, and this is something that no other file manager has, to my knowledge. However, I couldn't agree less with your ideas about a generic context menu. Think about it this way...when you right-click on a tarball, what's the most likely thing you'll want to do with it? If you wanted to open it, you would have double-clicked. No, you probably want to extract it. I'd go so far as to say this is the most common action performed on tarballs on my machine. Why would I possibly want to move this action from the top level? Submenus in the context menu annoy the crap out of me. They're ugly as sin and awkward to use. I do NOT want to be running through a list of "add to music library" or "open with gthumb" to find my extract option. The same thing applies to music (being enqueued in rhythmbox), photos (open with EOG/Gthumb/whatever) and all sorts of other filetypes on which you invoke one common action.

A new modern theme: Wasn't this supposed to have happened by now? Gnome is clearly in dire need of this.

Themeing engine: I think you might be a little mixed up about how Gnome's "themeing engine" works. Things like the obscure for-Eugenia-only feature of smoothing the corners of the buttons are handled by each individual theme engine. You would have to get every one of them to implement this. I have no idea what you're talking about with "the height of the theme".

File selector: This irks me. If you're going to publish a journalistic piece on a well-reputed websight with relatively high traffic, PLEASE take the time to do a little research! The gui shown in these screenshots is a temporary UI to test features. When people write the code for things like the implementation of custom widgets, they need a way to test it don't they? This is a design by engineers, for engineers and is not intended to be the final product. The only reason you're seeing it at all is because the development is open. This is not the final file selector. AFAIK it's being designed as I write this. I mean seriously, it has a lone checkbox at the bottom that says "Frobnicate the file"! Please do some reading before you publish this kind of stuff. It damages not only the reputation of yourself and OSNews, but the reputation of Gnome itself. As far as usability goes, it gives you the option to set your own bookmarks and define custom widgets. That's pretty good. That's basically a scaled-down nautilus right there. What more do you want?

Development tools: I agree that Gnome is in need of a really good IDE. Anjuta's cool, and it has some neat features, but it's C/C++ only, and the pace of development is agonizing (I believe it's one guy). Scaffolding looked really promising, but appears to have been abandoned. An IDE that could let me choose whether I want to write in C, C++, C#, Java, Python, or Perl (Gnome projects AND non-Gnome projects for all said languages) would be most appreciated. Until that time, it's all about gVim. I would probably vote against the inclusion of Eclipse. It's very Java-centric, a massive beast of a memory hog, and terribly cluttered. While it's quite powerful for Java development, it leaves quite a bit to be desired when it comes to C++.

Faster GTK: Actually I had a friend over the other day who commented with a disapproving frown "I'm seeing a lot of lag in your widget rendering." He's a hardcore windows-advocate, and I had to give him this one. I'm not sure whether it's GTK, X, the kernel, or a little of all, but it's true that GTK2 is noticably slow.

Easier to use API: What the hell. You didn't say what's wrong with it! I don't know what's wrong with it. Have you tried any of the bindings? GTKmm is pretty straightforward, pyGTK is a dream, as is GTK#. I've not yet tried GTK-Perl (perl seems so poorly suited for such a thing), so I can't comment there.

Glade: Might I ask what's wrong with it (besides it being "junk")? I use Glade2 all the time and I have no qualms.

Copy/Paste: This is getting to be embarrassing. Someone has to do this before the next release or I'm switching desktops.

Burner app: I agree that Gnome needs one, but this is another area where you should really do more research before you open your mouth. Coaster is not abandoned. The coaster guy has been working on libburn for a year now, and it's getting quite functional. Coaster is really no more than a gui that exposes libburn's functionality. The dropline guy is writing another frontend to libburn. This is exactly the same thing that we're hoping to have happen with gaim once the core/ui split is complete.

Gnome Office: Gnome office (unlike koffice, which is crapola) shows real promise. What's needed now is integration with the Gnome desktop left right and center.