Re: idea: special menuitem in MenuBar of each gnome application

[Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru>]

On Fri, 16 Feb 2001, Lee Mallabone wrote:

> 
> Alan Shutko wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Most programs will benefit from customization (even the kind seen ten
> > years ago on MS Office for the Mac where you can change menu and
> > toolbar order) but as we've seen, it's sufficiently difficult to allow
> > such customization that most app developers won't do it unless an
> > existing framework makes it easy.  
> 
> Most is not *all* though. I'd have thought it would be better to make 
> more specific changes, like toolbars that can be easily setup to be 
> configurable, rather than requiring all apps to have a feature that may 
> or may not be relevant to the app.

 I think this is impossible unless special APIs are exported for overriding
libgnomeui paramaters that currently can be configured only via control
center. I agree that it may be too much to involve entire pages of gnomecc
capplets dealing with UI (not all programs use functions configurable by those
capplets) - but this is the only way to achieve code reuse and to make this
hack really cheap.

> > Sure, it's possible that users will customize their apps such that
> > it's inconsistent with other people or the default.  But we have
> > customizable window managers, a customizable panel, customizable
> > menus, customizable shell, customizable keybindings.  If UI
> > consistency is the point, damn the users, we should get rid of all of
> > that.
> 
> Are you saying (to name one example) that you *like* the fact that 
> mozilla is skin-able? Personally I think the inconsistency with the rest 
> of my Gnome desktop makes it look ugly...

 To say the truth, I also don't like that much skinability of mozilla (I
prefer my gtk+ skin), but if gtk+ wasn't themable I would be very
disappointed. But let's not think about unix only - on Windows skinability
of Mozilla may be appreciated.

> And as for everything already being customizable - a glance around the 
> computer science labs in my University shows the majority of people 
> haven't even changed their background image, let alone their panel, 
> theme, window manager, etc.
> 
> Of course the best thing to do would be for someone to code up Vlad's 
> suggestion and then people can decide if it's A Good Thing or not more 
> objectively...

 BTW I can code and test it myself if I was paid for it (I'm sorry for
such prerequisite).

> Regards,
> 
> Lee.

 Best regards,
  -Vlad