unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 19. feb. 2012 15:36, Alan Bell wrote:
> One common request is to add arbitary applications to the launcher. 
> This is *hard* right now, you have to manually write a

It's not hard, actually. It's quite easy. Install Alacarte. You can then 
edit your menus to your hearts desire. Adding new items and menus is 
very easy and they will then appear in the dash. However, what Alacarte 
doesn't do, is to add static Quicklists (defined in the .desktop file) 
and other modern stuff. So either Alacarte needs to be modernized or 
we're going to need a replacement sooner or later.

I would personally want it to be added as an entry in system settings. 
You'd then have the main pane mostly as it is now, and then add new 
panes for shell specific features for Unity, Gnome Shell, etc. We do 
still have the old dialog that appeared when right-clicking the desktop 
and "Create new launcher" or something, so that could very easily be 
reused. I don't remember what it's called, though I seem to remember it 
having something to do with Nautilus. However, I would much prefer to 
have the menu editor in system settings rather than accessing dialogs by 
right-clicking desktop widgets. It also makes it more generally useful 
with regards to other shells. It would immediately work for both Gnome 
Shell, Unity and Gnome Panel.

I would have nothing against adding a Quicklist entry to the Ubuntu 
button, though. "Edit launchers" could open the system settings entry 
for menus. I don't think that'd disrupt anything. I think it would be 
the only place on the launcher where it would make sense to add such an 
option. For now, perhaps it could be solved by adding a quicklist entry 
that launches Alacarte. Since it isn't installed by default, I think 
maybe that quicklist entry should be added to Alacarte so that after 
it's installed, the Ubuntu button gets a new quicklist entry. That 
should be an easy enough job that it could be done in Precise.

There are some unresolved issues with simply using Alacarte as is. As I 
mentioned before, it provides no way of adding quicklists. Another thing 
is that if you add another menu to the applications menu, it won't 
appear as a category in the application lens filters. This means that 
even though it'll appear in searches and in recent apps, it will not 
appear if you browse categories in the applications lens. It's really a 
separate issue, but I mention it because that might cause some 
confusion. This is probably a bug. The lens should display the "Others" 
category (non-categorized). I reported that issue here: 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity-lens-applications/+bug/936296

It's a very interesting subject, but I think it's not as easy as where 
to click in order to show the editor. There are lots of smaller issues 
to take into account.

Jo-Erlend Schinstad