Gnome Icons, Gnome/KDE Menus need improvement

[Havoc Pennington]

Hi,

On Wed, 2004-06-09 at 17:55, Ivan Gyurdiev wrote:
> 
> 1) Half of my icons depress on mouseover (rhythmbox, totem, gimp,
> easytag, scribus, def. icon), and half just light up (xcdroast, gaim,
> thunderbird, firefox, screenshot, lock, logout, sound-juicer, menu
> icon). Why is that?

Icons where? On the panel, in nautilus, ... ?

> 2) Also...why are some of the icons so awful. The easytag icon is
> completely unreadable - it's a bunch of color dots spelling easytag!
> Could there at least be fewer colors? The xcdroast icon seems rather
> ancient compared to other icons of better quality. dillo, rclock,
> xtide, commander editor, Kandy, soundtracker, aterm still have no icons..

People need to draw them. Generally speaking Red Hat will only provide
icons for core applications, but even for those we can't get to them all
at once.

> 3) The menus have been critiqued in all the Fedora Core reviews, and I 
> have to agree - why are half the menu entires filled with names like CD
> Player, Address Manager, Digital Camera Tool...and the other half
> contain Ethereal, Kopete, KPPP and other application names that will
> confuse a new user.

The menu names should follow the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines at 
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig_new/desktop-integration.html#menu-item-names

When they don't, file a bug vs. each specific application that does not.

> 4) Why is it that the package htmlview installs
> /usr/share/applications/redhat-email.desktop and
> /usr/share/applications/redhat-web.desktop, which link to the correct
> apps, when those just result in me getting duplicate menu entries for
> my desired email and web agents.

It looks like someone broke this by putting Exec=htmlview in a .desktop
file. htmlview can't go in a .desktop file, it creates duplicate menu
entries and also means you can't include the StartupNotify field.

So a bug should be filed to move the redhat-web.desktop symlink back to
the actual default browser package, and out of the htmlview package.

> 5) What do the More <X> submenus accomplish, when it's not clear what
> the criteria is for what goes in them?

These are being removed, but the criteria is pretty simple (only one app
in each category in the main menu) and the goal is also pretty simple
(avoid huge menus full of crap).

The current thinking is that if you install a bunch of crap you should
see a bunch of crap. But this does mean that we have to mop up the
default install a bit, e.g. right now some packages install multiple
.desktop files some of which are crap.

> 6) Why do the gnome menus appear all in one giant column where I have
> to scroll (at rather slow speed) to get anywhere, while under KDE they
> appear in multiple columns?

The speed is something of a bug (scroll menus work a bit nicer than
GTK's on Mac). This bug is already filed on gnome.org I believe, should
in any case be filed there and not redhat.com.

> 7)  I am stupid and erased my home icon some time ago in GNOME, but
> now I want to give spatial nautilus a chance. How do I get it back?
> Surely there must be a way to do this?

In latest GNOME the home icon is not a file on the filesystem, it's just
a virtual icon that's invented by nautilus at runtime. So erasing it
should not be possible.

There may be a gconf setting to make it hide, maybe you toggled that
somehow.

Havoc