Re: enhancing ipks

Jim Gettys writes:
> Here's some traffic on the state of the Gnome panel. Dunno what the right
> thing is to do under the circumstances. We'll need to fix gtk's menus
> in any case....
> - Jim

Jim,

I confess that I have never played with Gnome that much. What are the
features that the gnome panel provides and what things do you think
are really necessary on the iPAQ?

My guess without knowing much of anything is that it probably makes
sense to rewrite the panel with its functionality broken up into
several small programs, (to maximize modularity and flexibility).

Here are things I would assume are provided by the Gnome panel:

 * A menu of programs.

        This could be reimplemented as an external program launcher.

 * A desktop/workspace pager.

        Not sure if this is worth the screen real estate or not.

 * A "dock", (ie. a program allowing other programs to render
   themselves onto a common section of the screen).

        This is probably the most useful thing for the iPAQ that the
        Gnome panel provides. I definitely agree with the architectural
        decision that this should be provided by a separate program
        rather than being a part of the window manager for example.

So what else does the Gnome panel do? If I haven't missed much, then I
imagine we could simply code up a Program Launcher and a Dock, (or
adapt pieces from the panel as needed).

Then again, I may have completely missed the boat here.

-Carl
Received on Thu May 17 2001 - 07:14:50 EDT