On Wed, 03 Jul 2002, Paul Davis wrote: > You all just knew I'd be on this like a fly on cow dung, right? :))) > > >3) "GNOME and KDE are only suitable for office-automation applications" > >Much of the "eye-candy" in GNOME and KDE *is* done from the perspective of an > >office-automation type of application -- e.g. a word processor or a > >spreadsheet. However, there's lots that would be handy for an audio > >application as well. Dialog boxes, for one thing. Theme support. Help > >systems. The list goes on. > > Lets take a look at that list: > > Dialog Boxes: > these *should* form part of the toolkit. the fact that they > don't is, IMHO, a design/political error. Given that libgnomeui > can be used without the rest of GNOME, i'd be willing to use > GNOME::Dialog, but i haven't found any particular use for it. > Its real purpose is to standardize the appearance of a dialog > box, but it adds almost no other functionality - the developer > still has a lot of work to do in many cases.
GnomeDialog is pretty much deprecated in G2, its functionality having been merged back into GtkDialog. On the other hand, preferences are supported nicely with the gnome libs with GConf's instant-apply. That's neat stuff, and quite useful from the user's perspective. A reason to have the file selector dialog at the "desktop lib" level would be to allow the user to enter in a URI somehow, for use with a VFS abstraction -- I think they are KIOSlaves in KDE, gnome-vfs in gnome. I'm a G* man myself. This is still hypothetical in gnome :/ Paul, I get the idea that you haven't looked at this stuff in quite some time ;) The other thing about desktop environments is usability. There's a lot more of a zeitgeist in support of usability (and accessability) within the desktop camps. See http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/ and especially http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig/. It ends up that with GNOME, I just want to use all of the libraries that the project provides. libglade, gnome-canvas, some of the menu creation helpers from libgnomeui, popt integration via libgnome... I just end up using it all because, well, it's useful. That doesn't mean the user has to run the desktop, they just need the libs. Also, the libs are well-packaged, so installing them is a breeze on most distros. > More interesting features would involve things like cut-n-paste > between apps of audio+MIDI data. I haven't seen any work in KDE or > GNOME to support this, though for all I know, it might be possible > already. This would be interesting indeed. I don't think it's possible (yet). regards, wingo.
