Month: January 2007

Joe [1]: I already proposed a “desktop-entry-hotplug-spec” [2] some time ago. I sent it two times and didn’t receive any feedback, so I wasn’t sure whether it is considered important.

The other feature you demanded (actions for files) is IIRC already implemented by KDE. I’m not sure how we should tackle this and I am not so happy with the KDE system.

Example:


[Desktop Action reSize640x480]
Name=Scale to 640x480
Icon=images
Exec=mogrify -resize 640x480! %U
Terminal=false
Type=Application


While it allows for maximum flexibility we’ll end up with a can of worms when internationalizing this since it will be distributed with each application, especially with routine actions like printing. Also, it doesn’t consider how many items are selected – it is common to use ngettext() for internationalizing strings referring to countable objects.

It would really be great if we at least had some actions – maybe similar to those in [2] – for printing and enqueueing. Applications would simply provide a special Exec parameter, and we could immediately see that an application provides this capability.

Oh, and while we’re at it I also have an old “keyword-spec” draft that might be of general interest. I’ll sent it to you by email to get some feedback.

[1] http://joeshaw.org/2007/01/14/452

[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2006-October/msg00002.html

For years I’ve been very unhappy with the MIME type/application association.

The Ubuntu guys did a spec [0] and came up with a not-so-pretty UI, so I hacked something together. The (not yet implemented) architecture is described under [1], a very first (failed) UI experiment can be found under [2] and the first serious proposal under [3]. I really like it :).

[2] and [3] provide python scripts that should run flawlessly under Ubuntu Edgy. It turns out that script languages extremely simplifiy communication between developers and usability experts as both can run a script and there is no compilation hurdle.

Feedback appreciated, preferably on the usability list.

I still don’t have a concept how we can properly integrate URI handling with MIME type handling. Maybe it’s best to just set the HTML/email message MIME type handler when changing the URI handler (the latter is stored in GConf).

[0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Usability/SpecEnhancedPreferredApps

[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2007-January/msg00064.html

[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2007-January/msg00065.html

[3] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2007-January/msg00068.html