Re: Argumentation on GUI design, was: Re: A few thoughts on Gnome.

["Haukur Hreinsson" <hawk london is>]

[much deleted here and below]
>> D: Neatness. No leavening lots of "." files lying around in
>> directory's, just keep it in a database, thats why they exist.
>
>Why do you object dot-files? They are intended for that stuff, and you
>(the user) are not supposed to see them by default - they are the hidden
>files. One database is one single point of failure, trash you're database
>and you trash it all (maybe you should refer to a "registry" rather than a
>database so people would be reminded of the drawbacks instantly when
>reading:-) just kidding).
Why do people like to crap on the registry concept? So, one company overused
it and implemented it badly. That's no reason to throw out the idea. Imagine
if all your settings and preferences were kept on the net (and cached of
course). You could walk over to a friend's house and sit down at his machine
and as long as the machine's systems have the required capabilities, you
could just identify yourself to it, and it would behave like your own box.
Your hotkeys would work. Your desktop theme would be there. Double clicking
a jpeg in the file manager would do what it does at home and so forth. (Of
course, your friend might not have your picture viewer installed, and might
have a completely different keyboard but these issues do not prevent this
scheme from being a great convenience tool.)

I imagine everybody agrees that all this is much easier to implement if the
data is centralized. I also trust you all know about backups and redundancy.

>> F: Open new windows by default. Though I do feel that this option
>> should be configurable, I also feel that it should fallow the by
>
><RANT>
>IMO this is very sick behaviour. Consider changing to
>/usr/src/linux/Documentation/isdn from your home (say /home/leareth),
>which would be ../../usr/src/linux/Documentation/isdn. That's SEVEN new
>windows. This is not just sick, it's perverted.
></RANT>

I agree. However, this is an unfairly bad example. Surely a directory tree
view would allow one to get from dir a to dir b without opening every
directory on the path between them.

>> E: The default menu should be actual directories with real sym
>> links contained within, ".<appname> files only created when they
>> become necessary.
>
>This would be nice.


I want the ability to control the order of menu entries and the placement of
dividers. Directories are ill suited to this function. Therefore I'm
somewhat against this idea.

Haukur Hreinsson