SoC idea: enhance the Program Manager, winefile and friends

[Steven Edwards]

Hey Juan!

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 4:18 PM, Juan Lang <juan.lang at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Personally, I think enhancing explorer to have its own GUI (rather
>  than launching winefile) would be an interesting project.  If nothing
>  else, having a graphical way to explore the shell namespace might be
>  handy for debugging shell issues.  From there to an explorer for
>  desktop mode might not be such a big leap.

Enhancing our explorer to be a full explorer replacement would be cool
with me too, there were just a few reasons I suggested using Program
Manager and Winefile rather than trying to extend explorer for the UI

1. Its kind of massive and I don't think we need all of that for
desktop mode. I view desktop mode as kind of a corner case that only
should be used like 5% of the time.
2. We have winefile and the Program Manager already and both are in
really bad shape. They have for the most part bit-rotted in the tree
for as long as I can remember. It would be nice to see them polished
for Wine 1.0
3. This is just my taste but I don't really like having a Window style
explorer bar running in a window. It would make Wine feel more like a
VM like environment to me. Maybe we want that for Desktop mode to
further try to discourage users from running it, like case 1.

I'd like to see when Desktop mode is invoked, a working Program
Manager launch that already has program groups for all of the
installed Shortcuts plus existing Winelib applications we ship in the
tree. Perhaps even a My Computer group minimized with support for the
Shell Namespace builtin and or support for launching winefile with
shellnamespace support. I know its a bit of a departure from the
normal Windows UI and some may even say using the Program Manager like
that is a throwback to Windows 3.1 but it just seems like it would
flow better from a UI perspective. Plus it would leverage the code we
already have in tree.

All of that being said I don't know if I could mentor such a project
anyway, just throwing out ideas. As with everything it really comes
down to what Julliard wants.

-- 
Steven Edwards

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and
that is an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo