[Panel-devel] application menu and "utilities"

[Florian Merz]

Am Montag, 9. Oktober 2006 21:27 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> hi all...
hi everyone,

> an interesting observation was raised on kde-devel by the maintainer of
> ksysguard: we have a lot of programs that aren't really "full
> applications" in the sense that kopete, k3b, kword, konsole, etc are.

I thought about this problem before, too. It's quite obvious when you open 
the utilities menu or when you can't see the application your searching for 
because all those strange little utilities in the graphics menu.

[snip]
> i'm not sure if there's a Better(tm) way of presenting them than we
> currently do. thoughts?

I'll just list some of the utilities that came with my kde 3.5.4 
installation and what I'd do with them.

These are roughly the rules I applied for deciding what to do with every 
utility:


- If the utility seems to belong to an existing application (or an 
application's workflow), make it a part of that application

- If the utility configures anything, turn it into a kcm and move it to 
kcontrol

- If the utility consists of a systray and a configuration dialog, split it 
up, turn the systray into a plasmoid and turn the configuration into a kcm

- If it's UI and functionality are simple and usable in different 
situations, turn it into a plasmoid

- If it isn't useful anymore, drop it

- If none of the above rules apply, keep it in it's menu or move it to the 
utilities menu



And this is what I'd do with some of the individual utilities I found 
distributed all over my applications menu:


-  KDE Groupware Wizard, kprintfax, kjots, kalarm, kpilot
integrate into kontact (separate kpart or part of an existing kpart)

- configure the panel, menu editor, superkaramba
should not be part of the apps menu but kcontrol (some are both right now)

kcolorchooser, kcoloredit
- unify them and integrate the functionality into koulorpaint and krita

- kfloppy, kjobviewer, kfontview
make them reachable by context menu only. (right click on the floppy, font 
or printer)

- wallet management tool, irkick
the systray should be a plasmoid, the configuration a kcm

- kruler, knotes, klipper, dictionary, ktimer, ktip, kpager, kcalc
turn into plasmoids

- EmbedJS, khexedit
move to development menu (and kdedev package) or extragear

- kregexpeditor - edit regular expressions
move to extragear, though it's fine in the utilities menu

- ktnef
drop it, integrate it into kmail or move it to kde-apps.org ;)

- kiconedit, menu updating tool
drop them

- ark, ksnapshot, kgpg, find files/folder
leave them where they are or move all of them to the utilities menu



It seems like quite a lot of those utilities can be turned into plasmoids, 
others could be turned into kcms and a few should be dropped completely.

Quite a large number of the utilities seem to implement a feature which 
could be integrated into another, bigger application. KFontView, for 
example, could be a kpart for konqueror instead of a stand-alone 
application. Kalarm seems to duplicate some of korganizers functionality. 
KFloppy should be launched from the media:/ ioslave instead of the 
utilities menu. KJobView should be moved to the print:/ ioslave.

It seems to me like there is no need to create a new menu/place/thing to 
hold and manage these utilities. Most of them showed up in the utilities 
menu because programmers didn't realize the right way to do it or the right 
way just didn't exist when the program was created.
There is some danger, that moving many of these utilities over to plasma 
might not solve the problem, but instead move the problem to somewhere else 
(namely the plasmoid selection dialog). IMHO this shouldn't be a problem in 
the near future as there should't be as many plasmoids distributed with kde 
as there are applications right now.


Greetings,
 Florian