Re: Reducing the number of special uris in gnome

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On 28 Jun 2002, Dave Bordoley wrote:

> On Fri, 2002-06-28 at 12:33, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > 
> > There is already one place where you can reach everything else, 
> > start-here:. There will never be "only one place". I mean, there are 
> > subdirs to applications:// that are other places.
> 
> No right now there are four seperate uris that are used to launch apps
> (applications://, preferences://, system-settings://,
> server-settings://) I meant one central starting point for launching
> applications in nautilus (of course users should be able to do whatever
> they want ,adding launcher to directories etc., but we should try to
> create a consistent easy to use default).

Why do you think the name preferences:// is so completely different than
applications://preferences to the user? The way you navigate it in the UI 
is exactly the same: (1) go to toplevel place, (2) click on preferences 
icon. The only thing you seem to gain by applications://preferences is to 
tell the user that preferences is an application.

What if the toplevel would be start-here: and applications a true subdir.
start-here://applications. That would be the same as you would want. I 
don't see why the URIs matter at all to the users, and if they did, i'd 
prefer the simpler preferences: than toplevel-something://preferences for 
the few times you wanted to type it.
 
> > > This is similar to mac finder in osx. There is one directory where all
> > > apps (including the macs version of the control-center) is launched
> > > from. I think having doubled functionality is confusing. I'm not the
> > > only one either...
> > 
> > Yes. In gnome this is start-here.
> 
> No it isn't, it's applications://. (That was the whole point of the
> vfolder method right, lets us created this one location for launching
> all apps that is not hardcoded to a central location though).

That was not the point at all of vfolders. The point of vfolders is that 
the menus can be merged from several places so that installation of menu 
entries by third party applications would be simpler, but yet controllable 
by the sysadmin/distro creator. 

> > So you want to expose the fact to users that our settings dialogs are in 
> > fact applications?
> 
> Seth already made this decision when he put preferences in the
> applications menu (and therefore in the applications:// directory).
> 
> (applications://Preferences, applications://system)

And I must say I disagree with this decision, since they were already put 
somewhere else before that. That decision was already made before seth 
made his decision, if that matters.

I would prefer if e.g. "desktop preferences" were part of the toplevel 
gnome menu rather than under applications, since I'm not sure at all that 
people will look under applications when they browse the menu looking for 
where to change the font. Of course they'll quickly learn that the fact 
that the submenu is called applications doesn't mean anything, and in fact 
whatever you want to do it's the menu to look in (unless you want to take 
a screenshot, which for some unknown reason has been decided is more 
worthy than e.g. preferences of a top-level menu entry).

-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a lounge-singing alcoholic master criminal haunted by an iconic dead 
American confidante She's a mentally unstable mute museum curator with the 
power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!