Better deskbar menu categorization

[mazbrili]

Ask for better menu categorization that no need user to manage it manually

​https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/idea-standardization-for-categories-for-deskbar-menu/13049/38

[nephele]

Aproaches:

• Flat list, one category per app
• Flat list, each app in multiple relevant categories
• Tree view, one each
• Tree view, esch app in multiple categories

(and tree view with collapsing leafes with only a small number of entries)

Of this I personally like the tree view or flat list with each app in all relevant categories.

Implementation:

Short and simple would be: add an attribute to the file with the category e.g DSKB:CATEGORY holding an array of strings, for example a flattened BMessage.

Deskbar can then querry for this and create the list accordingly.

[mazbrili]

did you mean add attribute done in recipe? Replying to nephele:

Aproaches:

• Flat list, one category per app
• Flat list, each app in multiple relevant categories
• Tree view, one each
• Tree view, esch app in multiple categories

(and tree view with collapsing leafes with only a small number of entries)

Of this I personally like the tree view or flat list with each app in all relevant categories.

Implementation:

Short and simple would be: add an attribute to the file with the category e.g DSKB:CATEGORY holding an array of strings, for example a flattened BMessage.

Deskbar can then querry for this and create the list accordingly.

[pulkomandy]

I think DeskBar already supports showing query results as menus. So, no development would be needed there. Just put a query file in the DeskBar instead of a "blue folder". Does this actually work?

If so, the first step seems to be adding the attribute to a few executables in HaikuPorts packages to ease experimenting with this.

This approach may show some limitations if we want something "smarter", but if it allows us to kill the blue folders, I think it's a good move to start with.

It would still not allow showing the menu as a Tracker window with big icons (that used to be a popular thing to do before blue folders existed), but we should fix that by allowing Tracker to show query results in big icons mode.

[nephele]

Just put a query file in the DeskBar instead of a "blue folder". Does this actually work?

This would be one querry per deskbar defined category, no? If deskbar should take the content of a the tags/categories to organize the results it will need code changes I think.

.

did you mean add attribute done in recipe?

You can also add them to any file locally or doing a build, but likely recipes.

[pulkomandy]

I found mmu_man "prototype" for using queries: ​https://github.com/haikuports/haikuporter/pull/202