Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Desktop Environments in the World of Pro Audio
From: Andy Wingo (wingo_AT_pobox.com)
Date: Wed Jul 03 2002 - 22:41:38 EEST
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.
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