On Fri, 14 May 2004 10:09:39 -0400, Colin Walters <walters@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Again, I don't think most users are going to want to spend time > evaluating various applications. Don't want to...sure they dont want to. But the fact remains that default applications that are being decided apun can be considered at best a compromise. No one can say with authority that ALL defaults being chosen are the best for 90% of people out there. Too many tastes and too many apps for the 90% rule to work for all the defaults. Most people will be fine with most defaults. Exactly 3 users in the userbase will be completely happy with ALL the default chosen apps. I full expect most people to feel that at least one chosen default application is ill fitting for their needs and will go looking for an alternative. Making it easy to find those few personalized alternative and to incorporate those personalized choices into the establish UI for calling apps is good design. Now... this does not require full menu editting and control. But there must be a way...a sensible way to promote prefered applications into the menus. > > If they have a preferred application, they're more of a power user. I don't know if I'd go that far... I would say they have been corrupted by a power user, who got them hooked on an application. I wouldn't call my wife a power user, but she likes galeon a lot. Its my fault for showing to her, and now i have to make sure its on her system or there is hell to pay. > Probably something like the MacOS "Applications" folder would be a > good solution here, as Rex suggested. UI clutter is what that is. Do we really want another way to access applications from the gui? The fact that in mac the applictions folders served a sort of packaging purpose as well, and mac had the idea of the recent applictions idea, the applictions folders was a piece of a thought out puzzle and served more than a single purpose of keeping menus uncluttered. I dont think implementing the Applications folder in the gnome/kde ui makes a lot of sense since it would be solely used to push things out of the menu and there is no corresponding recent applictions concept to have the menu ui learn your usage habits. If you are going to push all the 'other' applictions besides the default into a folder view in the file manager, you will have to have a way for the menu to learn from that user's usage of the application folder, so the menu will populate preferred or commonly used apps based on user habits. The real fix to this issue is getting the menus to learn user habits. Either get menu editting working so users can codify what they want directly or build in some logic so that the menu structure learns from the users habits. Power users are going to want full control of the menus, and I would assume that novice users would appreciate auto-population of the menus based on application usage. -jef
