Re: Application selection dialog

[Marvin Raaijmakers <marvin nospam gmail com>]

I do not say that having all applications in a menu it is user
unfriendly (I say that "browsing" for apps is user unfriendly). I even
say the opposite. But maybe I am not very clear, so I try to describe it
again:
I think it would be great if the user could select (not start) an
application by selecting it in an application tree (as shown in one of
my screenshots).
The Xfce Application Finder is a nice implementation of this idea.

What I would like to see is that such a dialog is part of GTK, just like
GTK has a file selection dialog.

- Marvin Raaijmakers

On Wed, 2007-02-21 at 12:37 +0100, Magnus Bergman wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:18:27 +0100
> Marvin Raaijmakers <marvin nospam gmail com> wrote:
> 
> > I think that at the moment there is no nice way for the user to choose
> > an application. GTK has a dialog for selecting files so why not add a
> > dialog to GTK for selecting an application? Some application allow the
> > user to fill in the command of a program or also have a "Browse..."
> > button which will show a file selection dialog for browsing for a
> > binary. But that "Browse..." button is a MS Windows solution. For
> > those who have never worked with MS Windows: it has a very user
> > unfriendly application menu, which in short is a mess. So that is why
> > MS Windows uses the browse button. On the free desktop however we have
> > a very nice standardized system for building a (categorized)
> > application menu, so that is not hard for the user to start an
> > application. However this nice standard is currently only used for
> > such a menu. So my idea is to use the application tree, that is used
> > for the app menu, for the "application selection dialog".
> > I have implemented such a dialog in my application keyTouch. For a
> > screenshot of it go to: http://keytouch.sf.net/screenshots.php . It
> > would be nice if such a dialog could be part of GTK and that the user
> > will be able to select applications by the free desktop way instead of
> > the MS Windows way.
> 
> I very much agree that having all applications in a menu is user
> unfriendly. But luckily there is an application called Application
> Finder[1] which presents all applications in a more sensible way (but
> I dislike the name since it implies that the applications are somehow
> lost). It can be used to drag applications to launchers and such too.
> Apart from that there is a also a similar dialog in gnome-panel then
> adding a launcher. You might be interested in extracting that and
> putting it in a separate library?
> 
> [1] http://www.xfce.org/projects/xfce4-appfinder/