Thank you to everyone who has responded so far. Spending a summer hacking Gnome is going to be splendid.
About 4 months ago (I think it was October), there was a discussion here about the panel. I was directed to desrt's work, but it doesn't seem to be complete. I think a rethink of the panel would be a great idea. Both John and Luis brought up the idea of widgets/gadgets/gidgets. This is definitely an idea that Gnome should implement. Personally, I think it would be neat to develop an interface for gadgets so that they could be deployed to the desktop as gadgets, but then dragged to the panel to function as applets. I also think that the current iteration of the panel is a little stale. While there doesn't seem to be any agreement as to how to design a new panel, I feel we should try to move in that direction. AWN is designed well, but it requires a composited environment. This is problematic for people with older PCs and everyone with an ATI card :). I propose a hybrid between the traditional panel and a dock. The menu should also be modernized. Vista's menu has a fixed size by default, and thus requires a scrolled window once the menu becomes to large (this is bad), but it has two panes (one for the program menu and one with shortcuts to file locations) and a search box (these are good!). The gnome menu would benefit from these two additions. (It could also look prettier, like openSUSE's menu). I know I'm all over the place here, I'm just trying to brain storm and start a discussion. The last discussion about the panel fizzled out some time ago. I know that Vincent wants to completely remove the bonobo dependency from the panel/applet-library, but on the roadmap he also mentioned a compatibility layer for old bonobo based applets. If the gnome default applets were re-written could we proceed with an API break in order to implement something new? Looking forward to it, Benjamin _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
