About box

Harold L Hunt II huntharo@msu.edu
Fri Mar 26 18:43:00 GMT 2004


Jack Tanner wrote:

> Harold L Hunt II wrote:
> 
>> Okay, I did it myself.  We now have an About box that can be opened 
>> from the tray icon menu.  The About box contains four buttons that 
>> link to our website (x.cygwin.com), our User's Guide on the website, 
>> our FAQ on the website, and our ChangeLog that is installed locally 
>> with the XFree86-xserv package.
> 
> 
> My apologies for saying this AFTER you did the work... The about box is 
> wrong. (Sorry, sorry, hold the flames.)
> 
> These links really belong in the Start menu (ideally under 
> Programs\Cygwin, but they'd also be acceptable under Programs\Cygwin/X). 
> This way, the links being URLs and links to .html files, they 
> automatically inherit the icon of the default web browser, making it 
> obvious what they point to.

I disagree, at least for the time being.  The reason is that we do not 
currently have such links being installed to the Start menu.  We have 
the X-start-menu-icons package, but that is not sophisticated enough to 
create links to files that should be opened with cygstart.

In short, this solution took 6 hours, the alternative would take more 
like 30.  I've not got 30 hours to spend, so it is going to stay like it 
is unless someone sends a comprehensive patch that fixes *everything* 
related to this desire.

> What should really be in the about box is something like this:
> 
> [logo]    Cygwin/X X11R6 Server
>     Copyright blah
>     Licensed under GPL (use standard short FSF blurb here)
>     Installed Packages (xserv 4.3.0-62, xterm 185-4, etc.)
>     Visit us at http://x.cygwin.com. (Make URL blue, underlined, and a 
> link to the site).

Yeah, URLs... tried it in a dialog box before?  I spent about 4 hours 
researching it and could only find that you can have one font for the 
whole box.  Unless we make this a true window it probably isn't going to 
be possible.

> The about box's window title should be "About Cygwin/X".
> 
> The tray menu's entry for the about box should be between "hide/show 
> root window" and "exit"; it should not be the bottom-most entry. The 
> entry itself should be called not "About..." but "About Cygwin/X".

This is the sort of thing that really pisses me off.  I modeled this 
after the SQL Server tray icon.  It has "About..." as the bottom entry 
and "Exit" above that.  I basically flipped a coin and went with it 
because I knew that no matter which way I ordered it somebody would 
bitch about it not being right.  I'll let the mailing list fight amongst 
themselves until a clear winner is chosen, until then I'm not touching it.

> Thanks for all your hard work, Harold et al! Here's hoping you get that 
> clipboard bug soon.

Thanks.

Harold



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