Hello, everybody. A while back, I reported a bug for Nautilus, basically stating that when application Launchers were created on the desktop with Nautilus, a StartupNotify=true element was not being placed in the .desktop file. I now realize that the issue is much broader than that, so I thought I'd make a list of where I see that the problems are, in all of GNOME (not just Nautilus). Perhaps the people that frequent this list could add their comments/suggestions too. 1) I'll start with the symptoms of the bug I originally reported. When a user wants to create a Launcher on the desktop, there are obviously many ways it can be done. If adding a GNOME application, probably the best way is just to navigate through the Applications menu and drag-and-drop the program you want to the desktop. Most if not all GNOME apps in the menu should use StartupNotification=true already, so if the user uses DnD, he/she will usually not have a problem getting a Launcher on the desktop that starts properly with startup notification enabled. However, if one decides to use the desktop's context menu, one can decide to "Create Launcher." The user is then taken to a rather "scary" and perhaps unintuitive screen which requires the user to enter lots of information on his/her own. Not only that, but none of the Launchers created using this method have Startup Notification enabled. This can cause headaches. Here's a personal example: I added a Firefox icon to the desktop using the Create Launcher method (it wasn't in the GNOME Menu). Before I knew how to hack the .desktop files myself, I was simply left with a launcher that worked, but gave no indication that the app was starting. So, my father, who is basically your average "luser" would double click on it multiple times. Often when I came back to the computer there would be 5 or 6 windows still open to the "Firefox Start Page." One way that could be solved would be eliminating the Create Launcher (and even Create Folder?) entries from the context menu and replacing them with an "Add to Desktop" entry which would work in the same way as the "Add to Panel" menu entry for gnome-panel's context menu. There, the user would have the option to add an Application Launcher (for a program already in the GNOME Menu) and a Custom Application Launcher. Of course, there are many other possibilities and I'd love to hear other suggestions, as mine would probably not be ideal. 2) Another major problem is that the user _never_ receives feedback via Startup Notification when external applications are launched through GNOME apps. Here are some examples of this: * I browse to my home directory using Nautilus, where I have an image saved. Nautilus has knows that the proper app associated with this MIME type is eog. So I double click on the image, and sure enough it opens properly, but no busy cursor appears as it's opening. * I open up Galeon or Epiphany (not counting Firefox because it's not really a "true" GNOME app) and click on a .pdf file. GPDF opens up fine, but again, no feedback is given to the user while it's happening. This problem is a little more complicated than just deciding whether or not to add StartupNotify=true to a few .desktop files. However, I really don't know enough about the inner workings of GNOME to think of a possible solution. But again, that's why I'm bringing it up, so that it can be discussed and a possible solution could be thought up. 3) The third problem is a difficult one, and probably belongs on the Freedesktop.org "xdg" list, but I thought I'd bring it up here briefly. Legacy X apps do not have support for Startup Notification, so if Launchers are created for them that do include StartupNotify=true, the busy cursor continues to be busy after the application has successfully started, and continues on until the busy cursor "times out." Those are the three main problems of which I am aware. This post is not a formal "proposal" as much as it is a "discussion starter." The freedesktop.org specification, as well as the use of it by GNOME and KDE among others, has really helped to better this problem. As can be seen by the issues listed above though, there is still some room for improvement and tweaking in that area. Thanks for reading folks. -Logan -- Ich heiße Super Fantastisch! Ich trinke Schampus mit Lachsfisch! _______________________________________________ gnome-list mailing list gnome-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-list
