[Panel-devel] application menu and "utilities"

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 09 October 2006 18:40, Florian Merz wrote:
> -  KDE Groupware Wizard, kprintfax, kjots, kalarm, kpilot
> integrate into kontact (separate kpart or part of an existing kpart)

kjots is an app people often use on its own. even if when it is a kpart, it's 
still a valid app on its own.

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

superkaramba is getting absorbed into the desktop.

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

they are wrappers around individual classes in kdelibs. these wrappers were 
written for those who need/want a colour picker, for instance, but don't want 
to open an image editor and hunt around for how to get to one.

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

this could work.

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

probably.

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

for kpager this makes sense, for the rest it doesn't really. and if it did, it 
would only be redistributing the problem to another place on the desktop.

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

yes, these .desktop files could use some refinement.

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

and if someone installs it from extragear? how do we show it in the kmenu?

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

same as some of the above apps such as kcolorchooser

> - kiconedit, menu updating tool
> drop them

*raises an eyebrow*

while i believe kiconedit has already been slated for the bitbin in kde4, we 
will need the menu editor.

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

these all seem to qualify as "applications" in terms of complexity and general 
usage

> Quite a large number of the utilities seem to implement a feature which
> could be integrated into another, bigger application.

and for those who want just that feature, now they have to use a huge gigantic 
application? "do one thing, do it well" is a good mantra to follow where 
possible.

> KFontView, for 
> example, could be a kpart for konqueror instead of a stand-alone
> application.

i'm not sure what the exact use cases are for this app; it's hard to say 
without knowing that. perhaps the author (craig drumond) might be able to 
shed light on it.

> Kalarm seems to duplicate some of korganizers functionality. 

actually, it's used by korganizer.

> KFloppy should be launched from the media:/ ioslave instead of the
> utilities menu. KJobView should be moved to the print:/ ioslave.

again, i don't think this makes much sense. whether or not we need to have 
kjobview in the kmenu is another question. 

actually, that's the question i was asking =)

> 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.

most of the utilities are there for specific use cases. those use cases don't 
go away just because we wish them to. and i'm not overly comfortable with the 
idea of simply removing these things for the sake of simplicity.

if we can think of a better way of presenting them so we don't have to get rid 
of them altogether, that would be a much better win imho.

> 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.

assume there are as many plasmoids as there are panel applets now. it's not a 
pretty result.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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