Desktop usability issues: some comments from the country of bears, vodka and ISO8859-5

[nf2]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Sergey
Udaltsov<sergey.udaltsov at gmail.com> wrote:
> 3. Open/Save dialogs
>
> The dialogs are platform-specific, it is a well-known fact. It would
> not be technically difficult to provide the selection mechanism -
> allowing user to choose the dialog variant he likes best. It can be
> done using DBUS calls. Once this interface is standardized, the
> dialogs could be implemented using FLTK, openmotif, ...

I think the first step (and requirement for switchable dialogs) would
be driving everything with a standard VFS engine. That would to a
certain degree structurally align what appears in the dialogs, which
IMHO is the most important thing for usability in the first place.

>
> There is one closely related issue - the bookmarking mechanism, used
> in these dialogs, should be standardized as well.

There actually is a spec for this and I implemented it for KDE. It
just hasen't been implemented by GTK yet. AFAIK the problem is the
lack of an appropriate XML parser in the stack below GTK and GLIB
(GIO).

> The most serious issues to address: [...], no standard VFS used by all DEs,

I believe that's - realistically - only solvable by picking one of the
existing VFS implementations as a standard, and wrapping the other
around it. For me it's quite obvious how things would fit together.
The necessary adjustments don't seem to be technically difficult / or
are already beeing worked on (like standardizing password storage).
Getting there is more a matter of the important people saying "let's
bite the bullet and just do it!".

Regards,

Norbert