making the panel launcher opening the preferred apps by default?

[Matthew East]

On Fri, 2005-12-02 at 15:09 -0800, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Matthew East">
> 
> > I'm not sure there is a lot of difference in the purpose: I started off
> > thinking that there was a difference between having a "firefox" icon on
> > the panel and a "browser" icon on the panel, but I decided that actually,
> > the user won't make a distinction: once (s)he has decided to change
> > browser, the fact that the developers see the icon on the panel as
> > "firefox" rather than "browser" is not gonna justify the fact that (s)he
> > has to waste (admittedly not much) time removed and readding the correct
> > launcher.
> 
> OK:
> 
> a) that means some icons will change function, fairly unexpectedly because
> other icons *won't* change function

But there are only THREE of em: one is a browser, one is email, and one
is help. Obviously the user is not gonna change their help browser, but
the other two are in the list of preferred applications. I don't think
they would change function unexpectedly at all: they would change
function (in the sense of opening a different program) precisely because
the user told GNOME to change the default browser/mail client.

> b) we don't have the infrastructure to do this properly for each function
> (trust me, this has been a massive topic of discussion around ISV issues at
> the OSDL DTL event)

Ok, on this one I trust you of course.

> c) we don't have the infrastructure to make the changed state obvious in the
> user interface, contributing to (a)

See response to (a).

> Making the effect and purpose obvious is tightly related in this case, and
> we can't do it properly.

In the end it'll be you guys' call, and you are best placed to make it,
so no arguments there.
-- 
mdke at ubuntu.com
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
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