Name: Anonymous 2011-10-19 5:09
sup dudes i was just waking and baking... using kubuntu and i noticed... in dolphin there's no way to kind of "open a terminal in this folder" or something like that... so i started to think about how to add that; and i realized that there's different ways to allow users to add things to a program:
* you could give them the source and tell them to dig in and change what they want to change. doesn't really work since in general it's just too much work. it doesn't pay off to dig into the sources of dolphin... first finding the correct source, locating the place where the change needs to be made, recompiling and repackinging the binary etc... just for a small UI tweak. who does this?! so the UI suffers.
* you could make the program more complicated: allowing some kind of configuration files in which a DSL can be used to control parts of the behaviour/looks of the application. eventually it will be half a lisp (and it'll send mail). but for every part of the application that you wish to make configurable you'll need to add in code that reads the settings from some place, and other code to administer these settings.
* what i'm thinking is: the entire desktop experience should be implemented in some kind of language that decently allows for on the fly editing (probably something along the lines of scheme or its uglier offspring javascript). so you could right-click or control-click some piece of the UI and inspect/change the code that's controlling it at runtime. So I could just edit the menu and add an option (or remove a couple unused ones) without someone having to have written a "menu editor". Or I could add a keyboard shortcut. I should be able to view and edit ALL the code that is running on my desktop.
Of course there should be a way to edit your source files to persist the changes, or save your program as an "image" or something like that. i'm one of the people who started programming after using mircscript when he was 14 and can totally envision this happen if the code is easy enough to understand.
what are your thoughts
* you could give them the source and tell them to dig in and change what they want to change. doesn't really work since in general it's just too much work. it doesn't pay off to dig into the sources of dolphin... first finding the correct source, locating the place where the change needs to be made, recompiling and repackinging the binary etc... just for a small UI tweak. who does this?! so the UI suffers.
* you could make the program more complicated: allowing some kind of configuration files in which a DSL can be used to control parts of the behaviour/looks of the application. eventually it will be half a lisp (and it'll send mail). but for every part of the application that you wish to make configurable you'll need to add in code that reads the settings from some place, and other code to administer these settings.
* what i'm thinking is: the entire desktop experience should be implemented in some kind of language that decently allows for on the fly editing (probably something along the lines of scheme or its uglier offspring javascript). so you could right-click or control-click some piece of the UI and inspect/change the code that's controlling it at runtime. So I could just edit the menu and add an option (or remove a couple unused ones) without someone having to have written a "menu editor". Or I could add a keyboard shortcut. I should be able to view and edit ALL the code that is running on my desktop.
Of course there should be a way to edit your source files to persist the changes, or save your program as an "image" or something like that. i'm one of the people who started programming after using mircscript when he was 14 and can totally envision this happen if the code is easy enough to understand.
what are your thoughts
/prog/?