Re: System contextual menus
Re: System contextual menus
- Subject: Re: System contextual menus
- From: Rainer Brockerhoff <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 19:51:24 -0200
At 16:03 +0100 31/01/2002, Ondra Cada wrote:
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RB> Also, using a service means that an application must be started; a
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RB> contextual menu runs as a plugin. Much faster.
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...
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Besides this is actually unimportant, for unlike OS9 Mac OS X (actually,
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NeXTStep) is designed to run any amount of applications for long long time.
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Therefore, you truly might be annoyed by a long service response, *BUT* only
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the first time after reboot -- which should mean roughly once a year, as soon
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as the stupid installation packages which want reboot instead of sighuping
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just those relevant daemons are fixed!
Well, depending on where you live, what level of energy prices, rationing and brownouts you have, what sort of work habits you have, that's simply not true. I often have to reboot twice or more per day due to completely non-technical issues. I can't leave my system on when I leave the office, for instance, even when it's only for an hour.
...and I definitely don't want to have dozens of applications permanently cluttering up my dock...
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RB> Finally, the Finder supports only the "obsoleted Classic way". The Finder
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RB> does not support file services at all.
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Well, that' right. But why is that?
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Actually the cure's simple -- use a decent filemanager instead of Finder.
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RBrowser is what quite happily use yours truly; others are satisfied with
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SNAX, and there's also MarshmallowMode, though it is rather a future promise
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than useable thing now...
If I made software for myself only, I might even do that. However, 99.9% of users will certainly use the Finder. I'd rather have a chance to sell software to those instead of to the 0.1% or less...
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RB> Now the question is: can I get at the Services API in a way that allows
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RB> me to collect only the enabled services for my current context, and put
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RB> them into my contextual menu?
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Yep, see above. Actually I did not tried it myself, and there can be some
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caveats (eg. I am not sure how and when the Services menu is filled, and thus
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it is possible that if you try to read it in applicationDidInit: it would be
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still empty, or so -- there might be some experimenting involved here).
I received some hints in other comments on this topic, and will look into it. However, I definitely will need to support the standard MenuManager contextual menus; both my own, which _must_ work primarily in the Finder; and other people's. If I manage to include services, that's of course nice...
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RB> (Even so, there's still the serious
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RB> limitation of having to start an application....)
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It is not, see above.
We'll have to agree to disagree here.
--
Rainer Brockerhoff <email@hidden>
Belo Horizonte, Brazil
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by" (Douglas Adams)
http://www.brockerhoff.net/ (updated Jan. 2002)