Making Studio work with more than one DE

[Len Ovens]

This is an interesting project. I have xfce, KDE and LXDE and have looked
at unity. I have seen gnome shell, but need to refresh myself on it.

Menus first. We have set up a custom menu to organize what threatened to
become a very long set of apps in multimedia, but also to show the user
new to art on linux and Ubuntu where the apps might be used and make
things less confusing. It looks like our content creation menus will work
fine with xfce(where it was developed), lxde and KDE. I think gnome shell
also has a menu, though normal operation might not use it. The idea of
typing categories or parts of app names is the big thing right now. In
fact this method can be used in all the DEs, though not so easy with
xfce... an app finder has to be started first. On the other hand Unity
does not seem to use a menu layout at all. (Not an XDG standard anyway)

In xfce we have gone beyond just adding workflows by adding some direct
buttons at the top. I do not think we will be able to do so with the other
DEs. To be honest maybe we don't need to do that for xfce either as xfce
progresses.

So for menus for each DE, I have decided to break the menu into three. I
start with a menu that belongs to the session. This includes menu edits
that are unique to that DE. It starts by merging in the stock menu for the
DE. Then it removes anything that is in the way. Then we merge our
workflows last.

This lets the DE authors take care of most of the menu. We only take care
of the workflow parts. The glue (the file that does the merging) should
remain pretty static.

If we need a workflow application, I would suggest that we need it for
Unity first. Because we will not be able to use a menu for that purpose.

It is going to be interesting in designing DE metas to just keep enough of
each DE applets to keep the look and feel the user is choosing that DE
for.


-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net