[geeks] galeon Doesn't Suck that much....

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Sunday, April 14, 2002 at 12:57:18 (-0500), Jonathan C. Patschke wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] galeon Doesn't Suck that much....
>
> Instead of all the recent focus about "skinnable" UIs, why hasn't someone
> played with a "pluggable"[1] UI?  That is, sort-of like Java, you only
> have the components/features you want/need loaded.  So long as you cut it
> up by features, rather than widgets, I think it would be possible to meet
> in the middle somewhere.

Let's just say I like Smalltalk, and especialy Squeak with the new UI it has! :-)

(though the programming model still has a long ways to go before it's
also a developer's dream-world! :-)

> I don't know what to make of this, really.  Lots of people were perfectly
> happy with Win3.1 or twm or System 7 a while back.  Many of those people
> didn't -want- any more featuritis than they already had.  Now, people can
> get too much of animated graphical crap all over the place, and animated
> cartoon-dogs when they want to search for files.  What happened?

Give them an inch and they take a mile.  You can probably thank both
Apple and M$ for this phenomenon!  ;-)

I'd probably be happy to go back to my DMD-5620 terminals if I could
just get them ethernet-attached and have their graphics drivers sped up
to modern capabilities.


Hmmm... both the ROM and development environment source code is
available.... and I have most of the manuals.  I wonder if I could turn
a sparcstation into a DMD-compatible terminal...  "layers" over TCP
would be pretty nifty.  Blue sky dreams are so wonderful!  :-)

(Then again I could just blow away NetBSD and install Plan-9 everywhere
and I'd have an even nicer working environment than a DMD could provide)


> Then multiply your savings estimates by N, then, since Konqueror does.
> How's -that- for a design flaw?

Cool!  ;-)

> I might be able to get used to tabs, but I don't know.  If there were a
> hotkey for switching tabs, I might actually like that better.

Tabs can be dragged around in galeon, even off into a new window (and of
course windows can be dragged and dropped into the tab bar too).  I
suspect hot-keys can be programmed for every action, but I'm too new a
user to have got around to that yet.

The only major UI flaw in galeon (and it's probably actually a flaw in
whatever does the menues -- GTK+ or one of the GNOME libraries?) is that
long menus, such as those you get from the bookmarks menu if you have a
lot of bookmarks in a given folder, are not scrollable.  Even if you
tear them off you can't re-size them.  Maybe my window manager isn't
interacting properly with it (the latest ctwm), but even so it's quite
annoying, especially since menu scrolling was finally starting to work
right in Mozilla-0.9.9.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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