The Gnome Project released version 2.12 yesterday. We had a quick look at it by using the latest Gnome Live CD (1.12-pre) and Foresight 0.9.0 (2.12 final) and here are our thoughts over 2.12 and Gnome's status in general.
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Member since:2005-06-28
>Adding items is not required
And WHO made the STUDY to really tell if it's required or not??? Can you please direct me to the outcome of the user study made by the Gnome Project? Obviously me, Thom and others need the feature. I agree that for Gnome and KDE applications it should be considered "a bug" if an app comes without a working menu item, but there are other GTK, plain Qt, older X11 apps that don't care about the freedesktop.org standard, and as a user, I MIGHT NEED this application to my everyday work. Therefore, I would want to add it to my gnome menu. Therefore, the current gnome menu editor is too little, and if I may say so, too late.
Member since:2005-06-29
Exactly, Eugenia, I was about to post pretty much the same comment.
I've just been browsing through mailing-list archives and gnome-bugzilla, and I can tell from all the posts that the amount of people wanting *normal* menu-editing, like any other DE or OS has, outnumber the people against it. Actually, I couldn't find *anyone* completely against users adding new menu items; most were indifferent to it (probably because only people like us join in ml/bugzila discussions, people that can do stuff like this manually).
Now, you are right that applications should conform to Freedesktop standards, and properly install a decent menu entry; however, not all apps will do that. Compare it to Windows; in essence, every app there should confirm to the admin/user divide in Windows; yet barely any app does that. So, there must be solution to this problem *inside* the DE that people use.
Other than that; how do you know 'normal' users do not need menu editing in GNOME, when it wasn't available for quite some time now? If I got a eurocent for everytime I heard someone complain about the lack of menu-editing in GNOME...
I called this an ego problem because as far as I can tell, the descision to make menu-editing *not* a priority is a developer-inspired descision; not a descision based on user feedback.
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lol
Member since:>>Adding items is not required
>And WHO made the STUDY to really tell if it's required or not???
Is a study really necessary? You seem to ignore certain points when you feel your position is being countered.
One point you completely blew by was, as stated in the post to which you wrote this reply, if the app isn't broken, the user wouldn't need to add menu items. In other words, if the app being installed includes a properly formated "app.desktop" file, as per FreeDesktop standards, the app would appear in the correct place in the menu. The user could then use GNOME's included menu editor to remove it if he/she so desired.
If, on the other hand, the app is broken(read:no "app.desktop" file), there are other ways to handle it aside from menu editing at the user level. Such as adding a launcher on the panel or desktop or actually writing the app.desktop file and dropping it in to the correct directory(generally /usr/share/applications).
IMO, handling menu editing at the user level is wrong. It should be handled at the system level with an option for the user remove items from their menus if they see fit. As it stands now, that's what we have. Provided, of course, that the app developers follow the standards laid out by FreeDesktop.
Member since:2005-06-30
Nonsense. It has been the plan from the beginning to only offer the required amount of functionality. Adding items is not required, because you should never need it if applications are not broken.
Then what is the point of having such menu editor? I understand that the average user merely need to hide and move menu entries, but you should also think about the slightly above average user that might need these functionalities. At worst, he could enable an obscure entry in GConf.
Getting another menu editor is barely a solution. Having two programs that pratically do the same thing is bloat.
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Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
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"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
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2005-07-08
...an ego problem. Seriously.
Nonsense. It has been the plan from the beginning to only offer the required amount of functionality. Adding items is not required, because you should never need it if applications are not broken. Even then you can easily add launchers to your panel, put them in a drawer if you are short on space. The fact that they don't appear in the menu is mostly a cosmetic issue.
If you need to fix broken applications and if you really want to make them appear in your menu, then it's not difficult at all to install a different menu editor.
You may very well disagree with this thinking and you may be right as much as you may be wrong, but talking about "ego problems" is really cheap and inappropriate. Seriously.