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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: New K-Menu layout suggestion
From:       Gordon Tyler <gordon () doxxx ! net>
Date:       2003-02-03 16:59:16
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John Levon wrote:
> IIRC, Mac OS had something vaguely similar (Simple something ? I
> forget...)

Mac OS X doesn't use a massive application menu. It has an Applications 
folder into which all applications are installed (usually). Each 
application is a single icon which can then be dragged into the Dock to 
provide a shortcut to starting it. If an application is not in the Dock 
and you start it by double-clicking its icon in the Applications folder, 
it's icon will appear in the dock but will disappear when you quit the 
application. However, while it's running, you can Control-click on the 
icon in the Dock to get a context menu and choose the "Keep in Dock" 
option to make the icon stay when the app quits, as if you had dragged 
the icon to the Dock originally.

What a lot of Mac OS X users do as well is drag the Applications folder 
to the Dock so that they can still get to other, less frequently used 
applications fairly quickly. This is aided by the feature that shows a 
context menu of the contents of the folder when you Control-click on the 
icon in the Dock.

We could adopt a slightly similar approach in KDE: Have an applications 
registry with a structure like that in the K-menu and then be able to 
add applications to the K-menu that you actually use. This sort of 
exists already in the form of the Menu Editor.

And of course we already have Kicker where ideally one puts the most 
frequently used applications anyway, so the K-menu is roughly equivalent 
to the Applications folder on the Mac OS X Dock.

A fair amount of Mac OS X's advantage in this area comes from the way 
it's apps are structured. An app is a "bundle" -- a specially structured 
directory containing the executable, icons, resources (possibly in 
multiple languages), etc. -- which is treated by the system as a single 
descriptively named icon (e.g. "Safari", or "Address Book", or "System 
Preferences") which can be dragged around the filesystem without 
breaking the app.

Contrast this with Linux/KDE, where applications are binary files with 
an abbreviated name (e.g. "konqueror", or "kab" or "kcontrol") in one 
directory (usually /usr/bin), multiple icon files in another directory 
strucutre (usually /usr/share/icons/...), and various support libraries 
in /usr/lib. Looking at the binary file, it's not always obvious which 
application it is since it won't have an icon and the name is the 
executable file name, not the more descriptive name that one sees in the 
K-menu. The binary files are also mixed in with the myriads of non-KDE 
applications in /usr/bin which only serve to confuse the matter even more.

I think .desktop files exist to solve the above problem but they're 
generally hidden away in some ~/.kde/... directory and only ever exposed 
via the K-menu (I think).

Another tangential problem is that Linux/KDE systems generally have a 
lot more installed applications than Mac OS X systems do.

I don't have any concrete ideas for how to solve these problems, but 
there is some fuzzy stuff going on in the back of my head involving 
.desktop files, an Applications ioslave or folder and drag&drop, which 
hopefully one day will resolve into something useable.

Ciao,
Gordon

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