[ruby-talk:8137] Re: Method as block to method

Jon Babcock wrote:

# re kmail: I'm not sure about the dev. of kmail versus balsa, kmail
# may be more vigorous, but I was thinking of KDE versus Gnome. And
# not just the rate of new versions, but the feeling I get that there
# are magnitudes more developers working on Gnome, ...

I don't know what the numbers currently are, but several factors make it 
*seem* likely that Gnome will numerically prevail: (1) the MS Win KDE 
licensing issue, (2) planned MS Win, MacOS, and BeOS in Gnome 2, (3) Sun 
commitment to Gnome. Cases 1 & 2 involve (-, +) *potential* mind-share on 
a hugely popular platform (numerically, that is :-) and case 3 involves 
*actual* mind-share on a very widespread UNIX platform whose 
user/developer community (AFAIK) is probably still substantially larger 
than the Linux community.
 
# Well, I think what "I" need most is a "MUI" (my invention), a
# Mmenomic User Interface. It's that aspect of the GUI that is most
# important.  The eye candy could be achieved in an acceptable way on
# Emacs under X. It is also somewhat the difference between mouse and
# kb, but I think that distinction is less important than the mmenomic
# assistenece that the GUI offers. So if going to the right place to
# click or having the right command to type were equally easy, then a
# simple window manager on X with Emacs and emacs-like apps, would be
# a matter of taste.

I think a lot more could be done on KB-GUI *hybrids*. To take Win/NT for 
example, there could be much more generalizing of right-click options that 
allow you to use the KB (e.g. rename for files and bookmarks). In cases 
where you need to select an application from a list, it would be nice to 
have a type-in box that was PATH-aware. It would be nice if the 
right-mouse-button menu open option for desktop icons had an alternative 
or sub-option that made it easy to specify parameters to be appended to 
the shortcut command string. It would be nice if there was some easy way 
of adding and customizing such things, just as you can do in a similar 
(but presently too-limited to too-clunky) fashion for browser bookmarks. 
Likewise, it would be nice if command-line commands had an optional switch 
for a GUI-ized version showing valid parameter options, with your most 
commonly used settings as defaults, and/or with a text/icon labeled list 
of the 10 most recently used combinations (and some mechanism for pinning 
the items you always want retained). And of course it would be nice to 
have a portable, user-specific, system-independent, configuration database 
for your accumulated customizations.

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)