Re: Reducing the number of special uris in gnome

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> > > 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).
> > 

Preference pages should not be presented as applications. That desktop
preferences is under a menu entry called "Applications" is regrettable,
and a point that Nils and I discussed for quite a while with no good
solutions presenting themselves to our little minds.

> > (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.

Eh? Preferences/Settings in GNOME have been under the
Applications/Programs menu for quite a while now. Ximian customized this
and adding a top-level Settings menu, which I sort of liked, and I
originally pushed for the GNOME 2 menus. See below for more discussion
of this.

> 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).

FWIW, I didn't think screen shot taking should be in the actions menu.
It didn't seem like an important enough item to me to promote it to such
prominence.

We discussed making Preferences a top-level item. While on the one hand
this is obviously a more coherent arrangement since we aren't
incorrectly classifying preferences as an Application, it pushes
Preferences to more prominence than I think is really necessary. I
originally pushed for this idea and Calum (I think it was Calum?)
convinced me that Preferences didn't really need to be promoted that
much. 

How often do you access preferences relative to either applications or
actions? It could well be that I don't have normal use patterns, but in
the course of daily work I use search and run, or launch an application
far more frequently than I change a preference. I do fiddle in
preferences a lot these days, but that's because I'm working on the
control center. That I guess is the primary argument against making
Preferences is a top level item.

Honestly, I don't have strong feelings either way though. There are
things to be gained and lost in both approaches. 

-Seth