Re: What is Epiphany's role now?

[William Case <billlinux rogers com>]

On Mon, 2007-03-26 at 22:25 +0200, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> Hello William,
> 
> Op maandag 26-03-2007 om 09:49 uur [tijdzone -0400], schreef William
> Case:
> 
> > small boarders, one toolbar ( I do wish it was more configurable ).
> 
> The Epiphany toolbar is very configurable and you can have more than one
> of them. What configurability do you think is missing?

This has more do do with work style than a missing feature.  At present
I can only add new toolbars or only add a few pre-created icons to my
"Main Toolbar".  I would like to add one or two program launchers like
Evo-mail, or Evo-contacts, or Evo-tasks; others might be StickyNotes or
TomBoy. I would like to add them to the Main ToolBar so I have
everything in a line at the top.  I really like the 'drag and drop' to
configure the toolbar though -- too bad I can't do it from anywhere
rather than just the customize dialogue.

In fact, if I were King, I would but my main toolbar on the same line as
the Menu bar.  No need to respond, I am fully aware of the gigatic
programing and tradition issues involved with this suggestion.  The
above wish is really 'free form' thinking.

> 
> > My bookmarks in Epiphany are reduced to the minimum I need to complete a
> > project plus some basic constant sites like Linux google.
> 
> You're aware that you can add your own smart bookmark for
> google.com/linux, aren't you? :)

Yes.  But as I said earlier, I tend to work from the Epiphany Bookmarks
Editor as a separated launcher on my panel or desktop.  To explain
further, I have two bash aliases I use when I am working in a terminal,
'goo' and 'gol' which I use for instant access to google via epiphany.
'goo' pops up Epiphany with Google as its home page.  'gol' calls up
Epiphany with Google-Linux as its home page.  I want to keep things
almost that simple for maybe 9 or 10 sites that are relevant to a given
project whether I am working in a terminal or not.

To expand further, if I could  assign sites to a global shortcut key
using my Bookmarks editor, then whatever application I was working in, I
could instantly get to a frequently used site.  This is different from
the common use of the word browse.  In this case, I am not looking for
anything.  I know where I am going and what I want to get.

E.g. Suppose I could bind Wikipedia to <Ctrl><Super>W.  Then, as I work
along in, say OpenOfficeWriter and I want to look for something in
Wikipedia, without hardly skipping a beat, I could <Ctrl><Super>W and
have epiphany pop open at the Wikipedia site.  By the way, I know it can
be done now with a small script and 'bind' but it would be nice to have
a way to just go through the  bookmark editor and add and remove
shortcut keys.  *I* would always use the <Ctrl><Super> as the exclusive
shortcut modifier keys for my Epiphany important sites.

> 
> > I do wish, someone would figure an easy ( one or two click ) way to
> > transfer or copy individual bookmarks from FireFox to Epiphany and back.
> 
> Yes, that would be nice to have. In the mean time you can search your
> Firefox and Epiphany bookmarks simultaneously if you use the deskbar
> applet.
> 

Yes.  But that is not the same, keeping in mind the speed and efficiency
I am looking for in the above comments, I would like a utility that lets
me transfer individual site addresses.  I had in mind something like the
following:

In many programs, for configuring, you can get a two window dialogue
which shows two sets of data with a 'add' and 'remove' button between
the data widows.  The user can go through each data window selecting
data and adding it or removing it to the other window.  For Epiphany it
would be a separate little program (I don't want to promote bloat) that
created a two window dialogue; one window containing current Epiphany
bookmarks and an other widow containing another set of bookmarks from a
selected application ( say FireFox, but in a perfect world, any other
Browser or a differently named Epiphany Bookmark Editor) and the user
could 'add' or 'remove' back and forth.


> > rebuild existing applications, but it would be nice to have a launch
> > icon or shortcut key on the toolbar or in the menu that can be added or
> > removed and configured by the user. (...)
> 

These are not far fetched (free form) ideas.  I can think of two
standard programs I would like to have instant access to while I am
doing serious browsing. 1) a notepad; like StickyNotes or TomBoy, and 2)
my mail composer.

First let me say, I do this already off the Gnome panel and/or the
Workspace Switcher.  I am only thinking of ways to make things faster,
intuitive and more efficient while working.

Quite often I am look through a site for some particular info and I come
across something unrelated that I want to save for later.  It would be
nice to select the info and with one icon click or one button push
(including modifier keys) the data is saved to StickyNote or a Tomboy
File with the URL included for future reference.  The long and short of
it is; for info that I am going to use right away I can select, copy and
paste from  a web site in three quick moves.  For info that I want hold
or reserve for later or for another purpose or project, it takes 10 to
12 moves, clicks or button pushes.

This is not a free form idea.  All the elements already exist in Gnome
and/or Linux; it just needs someone who knows what they are doing to
bring it together.

Similarly, I want instant access to my Evo compose window; others such
as Task list and Calendar would be nice but not nearly as important to
me while 'Work Browsing'.  Again, I can do it now, but it seems slow and
cluncky.  I feel that if Epiphany had better integration with Evolution
components I would have the perfect PIM for work.  I suspect (maybe
wrongly) with a little bit of tweaking on both Eiphany's developers and
Evolution's developers part a smooth seamless integration could be
achieved.

> Free-form ideas like these can be added to

I would like to see more use of the gconf-editor.  I want to be able to
keep Epiphany lean, mean, and fast.  And, everybody works differently.
I would like to have more features such as mentioned above, but at the
same time be able to prune features that I don't use.  In the
documentation, it would be nice to have some sense of the burden that
each feature puts on the speed and efficiency of Epiphany so that when
pruning, I could have some idea of efficacy of removing one feature or
another.

N.B. I maybe making a false assumption.  One of the reasons I am
suggesting greater use of gconf-editor is that I assume a large
preferences file and GUI would be a load speed burden.

http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/Suggestions - no guarantees they will
> ever become reality, though.
> 
I didn't make these suggestion just because they are features I would
like.

I was responding to the OP's question "What now".

I was taking a long winded way to say, keep doing what your doing.
Concentrate on making Epiphany the fastest, most useful Browser out
there.
By useful, I mean used most often to get ordinary things done, measured
by the number times it is used in a day, not necessarily measured by the
number of features it has.

Let FireFox have the 'playing' world.  It's better at that than Internet
Explorer, and has succeeded in challenging Internet Explorer for the
desktop.  So be it. 

> > P.S. More complete documentation would be nice.  I keep finding Epiphany
> > features, tips and techniques by accident that I never knew existed.
> > The features, tips and techniques are a good thing.  Not knowing about
> > them is a bad thing.
> 
> It sounds like you would be qualified for the job of documentation
> writer. :-)
> I'm not trying to be sarcastic here; the Epiphany project *needs*
> volunteers to take tasks like this one on them!
> 

And yes, I have been thinking that the time has come for me to give a
little back.  I am trying to make up my mind where in the Open Source
community my writing skills (such as they are) could best be used.

-- 
Regards Bill