unity-design team mailing list archive

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

I agree with all of that. I mentioned Alacarte as a fast way to 
accomplish most of the tasks. I think it would be better to make a 
general solution and not make it Unity specific. After all, desktop 
files is a specification that most desktop environments use. Instead, it 
should provide pages for shell-specific things.

Of course, designing something like that from scratch takes much longer 
time than reusing existing solutions. The result will much likely be 
much better, though, so this is without a doubt my preference. But then 
we are certainly not talking about Precise anymore.

> it creates extra .desktop files in ~/.local/share/applications each 
> time you move something to a different menu causing duplicates of that 
> item to show up in the dash.
It does that if you add to an existing menu, yes. It doesn't do it if 
you add to a user specified menu. That might be a way to circumvent that 
particular issue.

> it is logical that the editor would be in the system settings and it 
> also seems like a good quick access point would be right clicking on 
> the dash button since the editor would affect things in the dash and 
> launcher.

Right. From what I'm told, it seems it's been designed to avoid 
unnecessary contributions in order to keep it clean. I thought I could 
just fire up Glade, write some Python and register it to somehow be 
added to the system settings dialog, but that appears not to be the 
case. It's a shame. I've had lots of ideas for things to experiment 
with, but there's limits to how many hoops I'm willing to jump through.

> a number of us have been missing a decent user friendly not buggy way 
> to edit our new menus (dash/launcher) since unity hit in 11.04.

Yup. I'm one of them.

Jo-Erlend Schinstad