Gnome Icons, Gnome/KDE Menus need improvement

[Ivan Gyurdiev]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 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, ... ?

Icons on the panel - launchers from the menu.

>>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.

Who draws the icons? Each package separately? I thought you had a(n) 
artist(s) that did this... Who should I bug if I don't like the icons, 
for example? Most icons look fine by the way, very few I don't like.

>>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.

Ok, I'll read the guidelines and file the bugs.
The menus really look quite funny on my system, because I have just 
about every package there is installed. Therefore I get the GNOME, the 
KDE, and everything in-between. I get Kaffeine, KPlayer, Movie Player 
(mplayer), Totem Movie Player, xine, ogle, audio player (xmms), and CD 
player (gnome-cd) all in the same place - see how the names don't quite 
fit together?


>>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.

Can you file the bug, since you understand it better?

>>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).

Well that's not what's happening here. My games menu for example has 
hundreds of games there. My Entertainment menu has about 10 apps that do 
the same thing (as described above). Furthermore, I'm not sure this is 
desirable. I would like to see all my alternatives regarding a 
particular function next to each other so I can compare. It would be 
nice, for example if all the movie players were close to each other in 
the very same menu.  However if all of them were called "Movie Player" I 
don't think that would work very well - hmmm. (Note: xpdf and gpdf are 
in fact both called PDF Viewer and I can't tell them apart).

Perhaps part of the solution might be to enable multi-column view like 
on KDE, regardless of the more menu. Another alternative is to make the 
"More" menu be activated whenever there's too many apps, and serve to 
just distribute them over columns (in other words, dumb control to the 
next column). I actually don't like that idea very much since you can't 
see all the apps immediately.

> 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.

I think if you install lots of apps, you probably don't mind lots of 
apps in the menu... maybe there should just be multi-column view like on 
KDE... and more use of hierarchy to resolve the problem.

>>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.

What about the view itself - why do I get multi-column view in KDE, and 
a single column in GNOME? I like the KDE approach better.

> 
>>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.

Ok, thank you I turned that back on. Not sure how I got rid of it to 
start with.