Re: [proaudio] Thoughts about menu entries and usability

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Thomas Kuther wrote:
On Mi, 07.02.07 10:47 Frieder Bürzele <evermind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Thomas Kuther wrote:
Hi all,

I'm currently looking at the mess in my default "Sound & Video" FDO
menu (E17 and XFCE here) - proaudio stuff chaotically mixed with
video and audio players, ripper, encoding stuuf..and the idea comes
up to create a nice menu, e.g.

	menu root
	--> Sound & Video
		--> Pro Audio
			--> Sequencer
				- Aldrin
				- LMMS
				- MusE
			--> Sythesizers
				- ZynAddSubFX
				- OmSynth
			--> Recording
				- Ardour
				- ReZound
	etc etc.

I know KDE and GNOME users can edit their menu as they like, also
E17 and lots of others, but e.g. XFCE 4.4 doesn't seem to provide
that advanced menu editing..

So I could do this on my own... or for all in a maintainable way,
which means adding a package, e.g. "x11-misc/proaudio-menu"
something like that which adds required default menuicons and
generates the submenus (there are eclass funcs for "domenu" etc, so
that wouldn't be hard), and an eclass, let's say proaudio.eclass
that takes care this package is installed and provides some
functions.

But what do users and devs think about this?
 - that sucks, mess around on your own box
 - good idea
 - i don't care
:)

We'll thats really a good idea.
I don't know if I get you right: You want to create a ebuild which
generates entries for xfce4.4? from existing .desktop entries?

No, the idea was to provide a more
advanced /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu which provides this menu
structure, but the more i looked into it, the harder it seems to do,
because that would mean a) overwriting the default one from xdg-utils,
or b) letting the user copy it to ~/.config/menus manually.

And that would work for any WM with FDO compilant menu, like XFCE and
E17.

And well, some default gtk theme icons for those submenus.

But this seems a bit hard to do in a fashionable way... overwriting the
default applications.menu is impossible with
FEATURES="collision-protect" and a very bad idea anyway, and an ebuild
just for an example applications.menu the user would have to copy over
manually would be overkill. We could post this at the wiki :P

I've seen you've added some make_desktop to some ebuilds.
So first we need to update any ebuild and provide a proper entry?!
(as long as the application won't provide one itself)

hm should we abstract these make_desktop and newicon into a eclass
function? so we needn't bother about the details?

Those functions are available from the eutils.eclass already.
But what we could do, is to keep an eye on correct FDO categories like
shown in the links I postet, like for example
"AudioVideo;Audio;Sequencer" for lmms and museseq, or "AudioVideo;Audio;Recorder" for ardour

That in combination with a custom ~/.config/menu/applications.menu
will provide a more clear menu. AFAIK GNOME, XFCE and E17 can use this.
KDE seems to do things a bit more advanced, FVWM as dominique said
doesn't care of FDO menus at all, hmm..

Do we also need to update the the fdo database if we've created a new entry?
eclass: fdo-mime.eclass
fdo-mime_desktop_database_update

and for new mime types:
fdo-mime_mime_database_update


Another question: What is the standard resolution for an icon? 48x48. Depth? 8 what tools should we use to convert (which convert tool has less dependencies?)
So far I use mogrify from Imagemagick.






BUT as said, first there was the idea (which I posted right away
here :P), and then I started looking how things could be done, just to
see it's not sooo easy, hehe. Because this freedesktop.org menu stuff
is a bit weird..


Greetz Frieder


Any comments on this are welcome.

Regards,
Tom




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