Appfinder Ideas
Thursday, July 9 2009, 02:36 - Permalink
I've switched to using xfce4-appfinder as a replacement for xfrun4 recently. It's a pretty nice experience overall, even though I'm missing the ability to launch arbitrary commands like I could with xfrun4. So today I had an idea on how we could improve this: all we need is a custom tree model and a plugin infrastructure to allow plugins to be written as appfinder item providers. They could provide any kind of actions depending on the text typed in by the user. Here are two example mockups:
Implementing this should be relatively easy with a bit of experience in GTK+ and GLib. It's not as powerful as GNOME Do but it's also much more simple ... and useful, at least as far as I'm concerned.
Anyone up for the task? Maybe this could be one of the projects for next year's GSoC, should we decide to apply.
Comments
Hi, it would be nice, if it could be shown in minimaliscic window, such as Gnome Do.
Hi, it would be nice, if it could be shown in minimaliscic window, such as Gnome Do.
Hi all,
I am an xfce4 user, and I love it.
Have you heard of the announcement google did regarding the Chrome OS? I am asking because if they will succeed and regular users will go for it, just wondering what is the future of xfce4 as a powerful and fast desktop environment?
Love it.
You don't even need command line anymore to b0rk your system.
I was watching <a href="http://ivan.fomentgroup.org/blog/20...">a demonstration video of KDE's Lancelot</a> and was reminded of this blog post (especially with the part at the end about being able to do what Krunner does). It might be interesting to look at similar functionality for AppFinder, i.e. to display favourite applications, incorporate stuff from the Places menu and recent documents etc.
Very interesting btw how you can think of new ways to extend an existing application. Kind of like how GNOME Do got Docky :)
Hmm OK, first I manage to ignore the message about HTML not working, then I click "Send" quicker than I notice the error in the preview... *sigh* I'm terrible. Anyway, the demonstration video of KDE's Lancelot I was referring to is at http://ivan.fomentgroup.org/blog/20...
^*WISH* Please add a run as root checkbox
this all seems to be heading in a direction of possibly replacing or enhancing the menu.
i know we've discussed this before, but having some kind of tag-cloud for each application (so that you don't have to type the exact name of the app to find/execute it) would be a great addition - even though i'm not sure what the best way to achieve this would be. (how does gnome-do do that?)
if you really plan to continue down this road: optional minimal interface +1
Hi i ran the 'rm -rf /' command and now my computer is acting all different. It doesn't seem to want to work right. Do I need to update xfce?
Also look at Launchy - I am currently using it with the same purpose.