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

[A. Walton]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 9:11 AM, nf2<nf2.email at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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).

Would that be GMarkup and the corresponding GBookmarkFile? It
certainly sounds like it... We don't currently use it for storing
"Places', but we have a bug(s?) open towards moving that direction[1].

-A. Walton

[1]: off the top of my head would be something like GNOME bug #413076,
for example. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413076

>> 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
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