[desktop-discuss] [indiana-discuss] Indiana desktop UI spec - early draft

[Calum Benson]

On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 16:17 -0700, Michelle Olson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I suggest that we add icons to the task bar for only those 
> apps/tools/utilities that distinguish OpenSolaris from all others. 
> Certainly for May, we have a time constraint that might preclude us from 
> doing any of the following, but here is my idea:

I'm certainly in favour of giving good visibility to
OpenSolaris-specific features-- one issue of course is that a lot of
them don't even have GUIs yet :/  Hopefully signposts to a lot of these
features will be part of the first-time login experience, though, which
I know people are thinking about right now.

One other idea that's been mentioned in the past is providing a kind of
OpenSolaris 'dashboard' (maybe an applet or a gdesklet) that gives
community updates and quick access to OpenSolaris resources, and your
idea sounds like it could be part of something like that.

Cheeri,
Calum.


> 
> New task bar icons for all of the following that just launch the IPS GUI 
> with the appropriate package highlighted:
>     -zfs
>     -zones
>     -chime/d-lite
>     -virtualbox
>     -songbird
>     -PDA sync
>     -CD record
>     -inetmenu (or whatever is equivalent today)
>     -visual panels?
>     -Trusted Extensions?
>     -java?
>     -sunstudio?
>     -Mercurial?
>     -OpenOffice?
> 
> thanks,
> Michelle
> 
> 
> Shawn Walker wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 1:39 PM, Glynn Foster <Glynn.Foster at sun.com> wrote:
> >   
> >>  Calum Benson wrote:
> >>  > On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 13:20 -0500, Shawn Walker wrote:
> >>  >
> >>  >> Given Sun's migrating CDE users, etc. it might be good to either
> >>  >> resurrect or create a new applet that does this.
> >>  >
> >>  > Not an unreasonable idea, but I guess that's something we'd need some
> >>  > marketing input on.  I'd guess Sun might prefer to migrate as many CDE
> >>  > users as it can to a newer version of Solaris (when there is one),
> >>  > rather than to an OpenSolaris distro. That in turn determine how much
> >>  > effort Sun engineers would be directed to spend on such a feature for
> >>  > Indiana :)
> >>
> >>  I can't honestly see it happening, unless there was a significant demand from
> >>  the customer base. We've been there, done that before, and if I remember it
> >>  wasn't very successful at the time. The most used piece of code was Stephen's
> >>  menu converter, but given that was an old gnome-vfs module, I doubt it works
> >>  anymore.
> >>     
> >
> > I have this sneaking suspicion that it suddenly might become important
> > when users discover that CDE is no longer available / exists /
> > supported.
> >
> >   
> 
-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson at sun.com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems