May 17
Some schedule and RFI
I’ve been reading my blog and it looks like I’ve not been very active.
It’s not totally untrue.
I’ve been very busy (and still am) with final exams and should be freed on May 28th, at 13:30 GMT precisely.
Not that I haven’t done anything. I have a lot of design ideas written on napkins. I concluded that pencils doesn’t write very well and fountain pens tend to be.. fountains. So, I have a stack on napkin-sized UI designs on a corner of my desk. 
As for the request for ideas, I have some specific questions I’d like to have an opinion on. Here’s one: how far away from the ncurse interface should the GTK+ interface be ? To be more precise, we could take the example of keyboard bindings. Should I try to keep the same bindings ?
Keep in mind that the interface metaphor used for the graphical interface will probably be a bit different from the terminal interface. People will also be coming from other applications that implement some well known bindings. I’m thinking for example about the ctrl+pageup and ctrl+pagedown bindings to navigate between tabs which are widely used.
Edit: Hi Slashdot friends!
May 17th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
I think you should look into the UI of wine-doors, which, especially in version 0.2, has some awesome ideas.
May 17th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Hey,
Sorry to hijack your post and go off-topic like this but… I wish you
the best of luck with your Synaptic project, I have no doubt it will be put to good use.
And did you have to learn OCaml and Ada through your university? Because if so, I’m really
jealous. Here at the KULeuven all we get is Java, Java, Java. Now, I know C/C++ because I’ve been
doing it for a few years (even before my education). And I know some Python, but I’d really like
to learn a cool language like Lisp/Scheme or OCaml (or even Eifel), and not have it chip into
my studying/partying time. So kudos to you.
Kind regards, Nicolas
May 17th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
To Nicolas:
There’s a strong emphasis on theory here. The first courses are not “programming” courses, but pure algorithmic. We do a lot of stuff using pseudo-code too. A language is only a tool
Functional language gives you a great insight into algorithms. I really appreciated being taught that.
May 17th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Sorry, but i seriously don’t know why this project should be done. For me synaptic is just fine. It has the perfect gui for package managment. And compared with aptitude i don’t miss any feature.
May 17th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
To tenco:
Synaptic is okay for basic usage but it has some serious lacking when it comes to more advanced problems and configurations.
The dependency resolution is one point, but it’s not only that. The whole navigation in Aptitude is just much more efficient. Ever used Synaptic in a mixed-distribution install ? Say you want to install another version of a package and it has some different dependencies. Good luck navigating them in Synaptic. It’s really not designed with that in mind.
The targeted usage of Aptitude is not the same as Synaptic and never was.
May 17th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
Personally, I think that you should design the GUI from a blank slate. People who want to use the curses interface are already using it.
Better to make something that’s a good GUI program than a graphical impersonation of a terminal application.
May 17th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
To Daniel Burrows:
Mmmh.. Why should I listen to you ? Do you have any particular relation with Aptitude ?
You’re right about impersonations. Emacs and Vim’s graphical interfaces are more like terminal programs with integrated cheat-sheet than anything useful
May 17th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
If there’s a thing I would like to see is some interactions between softwares like “deskbar” and aptitude.
I would like to be able to type the name of a package or its description in “deskbar” and install or remove it quickly by choosing its name in the list given by deskbar.
So, maybe you could try to code [and document] your software to let third-party applications triggering actions in your Aptitude GUI.
May 17th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
To Eddahbi Karim:
Something like “aptitude –gui install foobar” that would launch and preset the install queue ? That would be interesting. Maybe something through dbus.
Exposing the whole APT database to search tools like beagle, deskbar or whatever is the current fad should be handled by APT itself, maybe libept, I don’t know, altough “aptitude search” is nice.
May 17th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Yup, it should do the trick.
The main purpose is :
I don’t like to launch another software just to make a search and click on install. I would like the software to open automatically when I’m triggering a software installation.
You can replace the “deskbar” occurrences with a small search applet linked to your application, so when the user want to search for and install a package, he just inputs the name in the search engine, select the wanted result, input its root password “et voilà”. With an associated keyboard shortcut, let’s say ALT+F12, the scenario would be :
- ALT+F12
- gedit
- Select gedit and validate its selection
- Input its root password
May 17th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
To Eddahbi Karim:
I don’t like when some piece of software behaves like it’s the center of the world either.. Reserving a global keyboard binding would be a little pushy. If it can be harmoniously integrated with desktop software like deskbar, I’m ok for it.