[plug] Good GUI Interface Design

[Cameron Patrick]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2003 at 07:01:38PM +1100, Onno Benschop wrote:

| I suppose some enterprising individual could come up with the following
| strategy:
| 
| Write for example a save-dialog box thing
					   ^ which doesn't suck

| , and have the window manager tell it every time a new window comes
| up.

That sounds like a particularly evil thing for a WM to do.  Fixing GTK,
Qt, OOo, Mozilla, etc to call this new save dialog would be a better
idea.

| Another approach to this would be to get the source code for all the
| applications you like and replace the save dialog call to one of your
| own. Since we've got the source, we can do what ever we like.

This sounds a lot simpler than the first one, to me.  Plus it isn't
WM-dependent, which is another advantage.

| We could even roll our own distro with the resulting applications!

Eek!  I'd rather submit patches to Debian and keep flaming those
developers until they include them. :-)

| Hey, who knows, we could even fix Copy/Paste ;-)

I've heard that claim often, but in my experience, Copy/Paste almost
always works as expected for plain text.  Actually there are articles on
freedesktop.org about the current state of copy/paste and of drag-n-drop
in X11, and it's not all bad.  (It's not brilliant either.)

Cameron.