Re: Shared application menu

[Michael Stephen Hanni]

Hi,

I'm no expert in this, but having played with the whole horizontal menu
/ statusbar idea...

On Tue, 2003-10-07 at 08:18, Stefan Urbanek wrote:
>
> What do you think?
> What should be other pros and cons?
> Would it be possible to have such thing in gnustep?

I think this could be possible, though tricky to implement. The major
thing is how to properly have applications own their menus, but have a
second application -- the menu bar -- display them. Sending menus
through a connection seems like a terrible waste of resources, but so
too would be maintaining two copies (one local, one remote.)

One possibility, though this may be more in line with the status bar,
would be to implement an XEmbed[1] like protocol. Thus, we could embed
the main menu view/window from the application into the menubar program.
I think, if this is even feasible, it would yield the best solution. The
main menu bar app wouldn't handle the app's menu save to allocate space
for it. That way you could have the rest of the bar to do with as you
please -- a "GNUstep" menu, an applications menu, a status bar space[2].

(As an aside: we already handle hiding and displaying of application
menus when the active application changes, so the menu bar could listen
in and make any appropriate changes.)

Other thoughts? This idea of having an application embeding controls in
another application's window seems to be little discussed.

If there were some people interested in doing this -- I mean, actually
writing code -- and some CVS space to bang around in, I'd want to play.
Just need to find the time... and the skill. ;-)

Cheers,

Michael

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/xembed-spec
[2] Implement the status bar/tray in line with the KDE/Gnome developed
spec. Allowing those apps to make use of our status tray would be a
plus. However, it seems like this spec is being completely revamped at
the moment...