Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas wrote:
On Tuesday, November 3, 2009, Daniel Vidal wrote:
I'am now working on making personalized
menus for Musix distro. I try to
do this task using the freedesktop rules, using .desktop files and the
"Categories" field. This is a real problem. All audio Apps put
"AudioVideo"
tag... and all apps apear together on a single menu option... Mixers merged
with synths... with DAWs... with virtual keyboards... Well... when the user
chooses the "multimedia" option of system menu... the submenu have three
columns of apps... Only a little set of apps put more specific tag like
"Midi" or "Synthesis"...
I would strongly recommend to adhere to the published standards:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/apa.html
If there is a real need for more registered categories, the way to go is to
propose the new categories to be included in future releases of the standard.
Some of your proposed additional categories correspond to registered ones:
AudioPlayer
Player; Audio or Video or AudioVideo
Mixer
Mixer;AudioVideo;Audio;
WaveEditor
ScoreEditor
AudioVideoEditing; Audio or Video or AudioVideo
There are other already existing categories:
Midi;AudioVideo;Audio;
Sequencer;AudioVideo;Audio
Recorder; Audio or Video or AudioVideo
Music; AudioVideo or Education
Regards,
Pedro
For a user it's more comfortable to have one menu for all entries
instead of having sub-menus that aren't fine. Just install openSUSE 11.2
RC 1. They added sub menus, thus means that if you compile Qtractor from
svn, it will be found in the sub-menu "video" ;). For users who like to
use menus for hook or by crook will be the need to edit the menu for
each desktop environment separately (nearly impossible because of
freedesktop). In addition even a rubric "Synth" might need sub-menus,
e.g. for the 1000 entries of bristol. Does freedesktop specifications
work for anybody? I can remember that I once had several wastebins on my
desktop ;), that there are always strange side effects when editing
menus, while using more than one desktop environment. The interlacing
between different desktop environments only causes trouble. It would be
much more comfortable if each WM/DE would use it's own files. Btw. I
guess most Linux audio users will start most applications by using a
terminal instead of a menu.
It's the only mail I read of this thread, but sorry, anyway I need to
reply, because the standards of freedesktop very often cause trouble on
my machines, e.g. when using GNOME and KDE and editing the menus, e.g.
by using Alacarte.
:)
Ralf