Comments on: MacDrama

By: Morriz

Morriz — Sat, 30 May 2009 16:02:14 +0000

Sry to hear this is so hard to accomplish. I must say that your app looks very nice tho (one of the best so far that I’ve seen on linux). Its just those workflow thingies that bother me somewhat.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 12 May 2009 00:30:15 +0000

Heh, its not so simple stuff when you dont have a giant corporation writing your shiny toolkit. Gtk was never designed to do what GNOME Do does, so we have to make a lot of it ourselves. Writing a simple widget to display pasted text is about a 3 on the difficulty scale, rewriting an entire text entry widget from scratch, with inline editing and i18n support, and shiny compositing… now thats a 10. Core animation, for better or worse (worse, much worse) does not exist on linux. There are attempts to fix this with clutter and pigment and some other crazy blingy stuff, but at the end of the day we fall back to cairo because nothing cuts it and do it all by hand. If you want to rag on something, pick GTK, or Qt, or anything else really that fits the bill. Mostly though, pick GTK.

By: Morriz

Morriz — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:41:21 +0000

Hi Jason, I actually saw it work on another computer this week, but wasn’t able to edit it after pasting. Arrow keys nor secting text worked, which is pretty basic but necessary stuff if you ask me.
About IRCing: I am preparing for my cycling holiday (leaving tomorrow), so I won’t be doing much on my computer for the next 4 months :) Hopefully I’ll have had enough wind blow through the holes in my head (airhead? nah), so I won’t be so agitated again about missing those little nifty things in my computerized existenz :p

By: Jason

Jason — Sun, 10 May 2009 21:09:13 +0000

Ctrl+C and Ctrl+v work in jaunty for sure. They are confirmed working, I just double checked, something is wrong with your setup.

I would appreciate talking to you on IRC, my name is DBO you can find me in #gnome-do on irc.freenode.net

By: Morriz

Morriz — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:50:46 +0000

@Jason: oh yeah, just installed ubuntu jaunty on my friends laptop. Saw it running Do 8.1.3. But it did not offer cut and paste (still). Nothing has changed since the last time I used it (2 months ago, also v8.something)

By: Morriz

Morriz — Tue, 05 May 2009 21:44:53 +0000

@conundrum: Ok ok, I know I am not too tactical about this, and you can call it ‘not agreeing with you’, but I am still not given any convincing arguments about leaving out these features.
And I already told Dave and Jason if I am not mistaken that I am not interested in learning Mono, so don’t expect any patches from me. Feedback I gave plenty, but I guess you’ve had enough of that now ;]

@gleeb: annoyed, how so? Look at QS and Launchy keeping state. You can just immediately type over it. Nothing annoying, just always there so you can depend on it. Almost as essential as parcellite, my clipboard history tool. You’re a poweruser or your not. I just need quick access to my actions and dont like retyping or redoing stuff that can be kept statefully. There are just no arguments that go against such reasoning in my opinion. And there are way too many ppl out there asking for the same. Its not just me.
And I know I can come across a little autistic, but I hope I wasn’t insulting. I wanted to address these issues, not insult anybody. Neutral is a hard bargain for me tho. I guess I gotta start editing my posts then before I up em :p

By: Gleeb

Gleeb — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:38:01 +0000

As a user of Do, but not of QuickSilver, I can’t comment on it’s functionality, but I would imagine that if Do were to come up with the options I used last time, every time I summoned it, I would quickly become annoyed…

I can see how it would be useful if it occurred after a fail condition, though.

However, how you go about expressing your opinion could, quite possibly, have a negative impact on what you’re trying to advocate. Insulting people simply will not help your cause. Thumper had it wrong; If you can’t say something nice, say it as neutrally as possible.

By: conundrum

conundrum — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:24:32 +0000

You’re claiming features you want to see implemented are the best and most logical, and that Do’s developers are “closing doors” and being illogical for not agreeing with you. All the while, they’re implementing features they see as the best and most logical choices for everyone, not just themselves or you.

Just because it doesn’t perfectly suite your needs on a personal level doesn’t mean something is bad. There’s a saying you’ll hear a lot with that kind of attitude in F/OSS: “patches welcome.”

By: Morriz

Morriz — Tue, 05 May 2009 08:40:43 +0000

The features you offer are probably really helping a lot of people out there. But you are starting to sound just like Dave, giving me bla why a useful, wanted and proven feature should not come into Do. Its this closing of doors that I have run into too often now while talking to the Do dev team. I guess there’s a lot of programmers outthere that seek reinforcement in their logic, and not in the obvious. Open up, and then truly think about these issues in all aspects. Is such a simple and useful feature as keeping state not built because that crappy Gnome desktop is also failing to deliver usability? Are you being held back because you are conservative and want to preserver the rotten old way of doing things? I suggest you too read up on usability. Until you can come back with a constructive vision on these matters, instead of closing doors with your logic about ‘consistency’ (of crap), I suggest we leave it at this, because I feel I am wasting time. I don’t want to be rude or anything, but I too am a logical thinker (sure, in my own way as well). And I get the sense this conversation is not going anywhere. Just keep happily working on what you are building. It certainly has potential and looks great. Hope you guys get a true interaction designer on the team tho. Pfff…its hard to say what I’m thinking without sounding condescending (if I read back what I just typed), but I don’t want to re-edit myself all the time until I am political enough. Plus I dont want to waste time. Off to a day with my friend and two recumbents now :)

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 05 May 2009 02:59:32 +0000

There are quite a few things Do can do that quicksilver cannot (just look at our now massive plugin list). Do started as a quicksilver clone but is very much so not trying to mimic it to be unrecognizably identical.

Does GNOME Do remember your last selections? Internally it would be trivial to implement (really really trivial), however doing so presents a stateful interface to the user that would be inconsistent with the rest of the way the GNOME desktop tends to work. While I understand why you like the feature, its more important to be consistent in the context of the desktop you or developing for.

Current Selection is known as Selected Text, and Current Application controls are available through the Window Manager plugin (I think thats what you are after). QS may have had a head start, but we aren’t even running in the same direction, so we’ll get where we are going first anyhow.