(Not) Customizing Gnome

Paul A Houle ph18 at cornell.edu
Wed Nov 2 20:17:17 UTC 2005


Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:

>
>Drag-and-drop your most common applications from the menu into your
>top panel for one-click access.
>  
>
    This is a nice answer in some cases,  but it doesn't always scale.  
In a single-panel configuration,  I'd rather have the space for window 
icons.

    I put 'sixtyforce' and 'snes' on the dock on my minimac because my 
toddler loves mario and bomberman -- I took itunes and other 
self-serving stuff off the dock until the day he begged to hear the 
latest 'Gorillaz' song and I figured that 99 cents was a good bargain.  
The only other graphical apps I run on that machine are 'terminal' and 
mozilla,  so this system works great for that use case.

    Application icons (and the tray) are a part of the problem on 
Windows:  every time I install a new app,  I get new buttons that I 
couldn't care less for.

    For the machine I'm customizing now,  panel launchers aren't an 
option at all -- I want to select about 20 different scripts.  I don't 
know if they'd all fit. These are all scripts that use uxterm,  slogin 
and sometimes expect,  so providing small icons that are visually 
distinctive and meaningful would be a big graphic design job.  If I made 
the panel 60 columns wide,  you could write captions under the icons,  
but then they wouldn't fit -- I'd either have to make the icons manually 
with a graphics editor,  or I'd have to write a scheme script to add the 
text in the gimp.

    On the other hand,  the 20 scripts are easily described with words,  
and easily organized in a hiearchy,  so a pull-down menu is just right.  
I'd be happy to have no icon or the same icon for all of them,  so 
specifying a .desktop file would be a waste of time.

    And that's what customization comes down to -- different use cases.  
MythTV has a great interface for a media center,  but I'd hate to do 
software development in that kind of interface.  I've got some computers 
where I spend a lot of time running a few graphical applications.  I've 
got other computers that I only run uxterm and emacs on.

    I've also got a lot of interest in 'passive' customization systems 
-- I love yahoo finance,  because it remembers the stocks that I ask 
quotes for,  so I automatically get a report on the stocks,  mutual 
funds,  and indices that I care about.  This would be useless if I was a 
professional fund manager,  but it's just great for the average person.




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