On Tue, 2005-07-12 at 01:01 +0200, Maciej Katafiasz wrote: > APPLICATIONS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE RUN FROM DESKTOP. Having crappy > Applications menu or suffering from must-put-my-branding-everywhere > ISV-itis is not an excuse. Desktop is for user's work (and only for > user's work), application launchers clearly aren't user's work.
Well, applications are part of *my* work... I have a calculator on my real desktop, and I'd go mental if I had to go and open my filing cabinet or look up on the wall (which is the nearest real-world equivalent of a 'panel' I can think of ATM) every time I wanted to use it :) FWIW, I've always thought that the desktop should really just be one big two-dimensional panel, with as similar capabilities and interactions to the panel as possible. (A direction that we're arguably headed anyway, with the increasing popularity of things like Konfabulator, gdesklets and Apple's Dashboard.) Having two objects that share many similar behaviours but also have some arbitrarily different ones is a surefire way to screw up a user's conceptual model. Having said that, I totally agree that we should strongly discourage applications to install launchers on the desktop... if we could find a way to prevent that whilst still allowing the user to create their own, I'd be entirely in favour. Just because a feature is open to annoying-but-harmless abuse shouldn't automatically mean we deprive our users of it though, provided they consider the usefulness to outweigh the annoyance. Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Java Desktop System Group http://ie.sun.com +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
