More default applications

[Matt Medland]

Dean Sas wrote:
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> Adam Petaccia wrote:
>> On Sat, 2007-07-07 at 12:03 +0100, Dean Sas wrote:
>> Mikko Ohtamaa wrote:
>>>>> I was wondering are there any plans to add more default applications to
>>>>> Gnome's "Preferred applications". Currently it has web browser, email
>>>>> client and terminal.
> 
> I've just looked, and in Feisty there's also Accessibility and Multimedia.
> 
>> There was a discussion some months ago about that, I think the majority
>> of it on the gnome usability list. As far as I'm aware nothing concrete
>> came of it.
> 
> A spec came out of it actually
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/enhanced-preferred-apps
> 
> This is usually the kind of thing that should be implemented by GNOME
> (upstream) though, not Ubuntu. There was a discussion upstream about it
> here: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2007-January/msg00052.html
> 
> There's also an upstream bug
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171871 about it.

As the initial drafter of the spec I feel obliged to comment. When I 
tryed to start this I became overwhelmed very quickly, because this was 
the first time I attempted to put anything forward, and it came up 
against a lot of resistance.

If you trawl through that mailing list archive you'll see that we were 
struggling to come up with a solution that everybody was satisfied with. 
If think this is due the inherent difficulties in making it accessible 
to new GNOME/Ubuntu users and to make a decent improvment in the amount 
of configurability avaliable.

Christian Neumair came up with a good solution that probably could have 
worked; but sadly we lost the impetus (me included) and it pretty much 
stopped. It would be great if we could get this going again, and 
hopefully with people who know what their doing (unlike myself) in 
regards to specifications.