Customize Panels dialog (Was: Re: panel item remove confirmation)

[Carol Spears]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 11:04:45AM -0400, Ori Bernstein wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Oct 2005 15:15:00 +0200, Jasper Huijsmans <jasper at xfce.org> said:
> 
> > Alright, what do you think about these screenshots:
> > 
> > http://xfce.loculus.nl/files/customize-panel-1.png
> 
> Hm, it would probably be nice to have an "add" button on this dialog, since DND
> is good, but a bit on the undiscoverable side. I can easily imagine a user
> sitting there and scratching their head, thinking "where's the button to add
> this"?
> 
that would have been me.  i would have been picking my nose and chain
smoking trying to figure it out though.

> > http://xfce.loculus.nl/files/customize-panel-2.png
> >
> > The second tab looks cluttered, so I'm open for suggestions. The first 
> > tab still has a treeview, but could easily be changed to something more 
> > like the firefox dialog, with icons in a grid.
> 
i have actually found this new xfce to be more intuitive than the new
firefox.  however, that is being spiced with issues with its web based 
download.  it seems like for me, since Netscape3, i look for the same 
functions in each new version/generation.  "oh, we do everything *this* 
way now!"  what the firefox preferences lacks in clutter it makes up for
looking funny when it expands to show the clutter.  they probably
screwed up with their default settings though.  i got really angry
because i thought i had told it to stop resizing my images (it decided
to munge an image by only about 10 pixels for me, for instance).  it
took a while to find this "advanced" option they had set by default for
me.  it doesn't even help if you have a slow internet connection.

sorry, that is off-topic.  except for when you start making several
options look like only a few.  in real life, everytime i clean up and
put stuff away -- several things get lost for a very long time.

> That might get a bit weird, though.
> 
what is the smallest computer that this desk-stuff is running on?  i ask
that because when i started to work with the gimp developers, a few of
them had no clue that gimp worked on as little a set up as i was working
with.

there is a chance that it is not humanly possible to write software that
can dnd with a small set up like that.  (one of them made me prove
online that i was indeed running a 468 with 512 ram and 70M hard drive
and all the supporting hardware one would expect).  i could do this
easily.  i was running gimp (gimp and netscape4 could not run easily at
the same time) and an apache web server and irc2 on this thing and it
was kicking this computers ass (it is 450MHz or something like that)
running microsoft/adobe together.  

microsoft has improved my life by antiquing perfectly good computers.  i
got this one right before it hit the trash.  the family using it felt
the need to buy two more generations of computers to keep up.

i have it in mind that i might one day have a room full of old small and
deprecated computers that run linux and its software just fine.  that is
the reason that i ask you to consider how this dnd stuff works on a
minimal hardware set up.

mozilla.org seems to not have even known about that world from the
beginning of their project.  i was "sold" (sorry for using this word to
describe my using your nice desktop environment) on xfce since it seemed
to understand the evils of software bloat.  there is some evil in
hardware bloat also.

carol