unity-design team mailing list archive

[Evan Huus <eapache@xxxxxxxxx>]

I agree with the problem, however I believe the suggested solution has a
few issues.

At the moment, empty launcher space has no interactions at all. I recall
from an earlier discussion (when it was suggested to add a 'Settings' to
the quicklist of empty launcher space) that this was a design choice, that
empty space shouldn't have any interactions. I can't find the discussion at
the moment, but perhaps someone else could confirm this.

I believe the problem was that options like this would then disappear if
the launcher became full, which is confusing and inconsistent. If the
option was added to the quicklist of the entire launcher, regardless of
whether it's empty or not, it ends up getting mixed in with all the other
quicklist items for a given tile, which is also confusing.

To my mind, a better solution to the same problem would add a USC feature
to manage 'custom' applications (designing the interface for which is a
whole other problem). The user then adds the application in question as a
'custom' app in the USC. It shows up in the dash like any other
application, and the user can drag or lock it to the launcher if they want.
This is nice in that it's still usable if the launcher becomes full. It's
also nice in that the USC becomes the central place for all application
management, even if the app isn't packaged in the archives. Since
presumably custom apps would be editable via the same section of the USC,
this solves that problem as well.

As I mentioned, designing the USC interface and behaviour for custom apps
is a big and complicated issue in its own right, but probably worth doing.

Thoughts? Other solutions?

Evan

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 9:36 AM, Alan Bell <alanbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> One common request is to add arbitary applications to the launcher. This
> is *hard* right now, you have to manually write a .desktop file (by looking
> up the syntax on gnome.org or freedesktop.org) and then put it somewhere
> that is a system area or a hidden folder. Most users don't bother because
> it is too hard and continue to launch things like minecraft from the
> terminal.
>
> I would like to be able to right click an empty bit of the launcher or the
> BFB and have a quicklist option to add a launcher. This would pop up a
> small dialog asking for
>
> Name
> Comment
> Command to run
> Icon
> Terminal
>
> and have buttons for:
>
> save for one user in ~/.local/share/applications
> save for all users in /usr/share/applications
> add to Unity Launcher.
>
> Some means of editing existing .desktop files would also be good
>
> thoughts and comments please . . .
>
> Alan
>
>
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