Context menu for Deskbar application entries

[stippi]

Currently, clicking the Deskbar application entries with the primary or secondary mouse button makes no difference, it opens the window management sub-menu.

It could be cool to make the secondary click open a context menu, with at least these entries:

• Start this application at boot
• Make this entry sticky

The first feature would link the application into the launch folder. Perhaps the menu could be fine-tuned to support distinguishing between all users or only the current user.

The second feature is a rip-off of Windows 7. I think it's great for pulling the LaunchBox feature set into Deskbar. A stick application is simply not running at first, you can click the button or drop files onto the entry, which will launch it then, just like in LaunchBox. For example, if you have both LaunchBox and DeskBar open, running applications get two icons on the screen, while the functionality of Deskbar and LaunchBox partly overlaps. You could say LaunchBox only exists, because Deskbar has some features missing...

[jonas.kirilla]

+1 to both features.

[leavengood]

I don't know if you want to go this far (and this is definitely in R2 territory) but another nice feature from Win7 and Mac OS X is the customizable context menu available on right click of an app in the taskbar or Dock. Basically the app can export a menu that gets shown on right click, in addition to the standard options (such as those you are proposing.)

This would not be difficult but it would require some sort of protocol between the Deskbar and the apps to build the menu. Then there are the details of whether the Deskbar queries the app for the menu each time, or if the app exports it and then updates it as needed whenever something changes. But those are easy enough to work out.

[polari]

With regards to the making apps sticky feature, I'm not sure how this should be approached from a visual design perspective. My best suggestion is to simply have the icon in grayscale and the text slightly faded from the black we use for open applications, but that's not particularly elegant.

Alternatively there could be a glow around the icons of running applications, but the deskbar icons are probably too small for this to be easily visually distinguishable.

Also, to me having an additional context menu seems unneccessary. It's not easily discoverable by users and the proposal is only to add two entries so I don't think it would be a big deal to add them to the window management sub-menu with a separator, below "Close all".