Suggestions for Pi-Apps

[jay-flo]

First I want to start off by saying that you're doing a great job with this app. There are a few suggestions that I would like to make, regarding the way the app works, to make the user experience a little smoother.

1. When I double click on an item in the list, instead of closing the window and opening a new window, simply open the new window and leave the previous window open. Alternatively, make it a paned app, with the categories in the left pane and the apps associated with the category in the right pane.
2. When I drag the app window to a different area of the screen, it should stay where I put it. This goes back to the first issue where the window is closed and a new window is opened. When second window closes and the first window reopens it comes back to the center of the screen, instead of where I previously dragged it.
3. When I am browsing through the apps list and I double click and item, or click on the info button, to view information about it the window closes, and again a new window opens to show me the info, which really ends up being little more than what is in the tool-tips that appear when I hover the mouse. This is all fine, but when I close the info window it re-opens the apps list, but the apps list is re-loaded as well and instead of the list being positioned where I left off, it starts over at the beginning of the list. A minor inconvenience, but it could become very cumbersome when you end up with a few hundred more apps in the list.

[Itai-Nelken]

while your suggestions will certainly make using pi-apps feel much better, most of them are impossible to do with yad (the GUI program pi-apps uses).

my thoughts on your suggestions:

1. not closing the main window is possible.
2. opening the window where it was last left is possible.
3. The app list isn't reloaded, it's read from a file.
   reading files isn't very fast, and there isn't much we haven't done and know about that can be made to make it faster.

Anyway thanks for the suggestions!

[Botspot]

I have been considering a dual-pane GUI for a while now. I experimented with various techniques when creating the Windows Screensavers program and my PiTunes program. (unreleased due to lack of self-interest)

I just finished coding a mockup pi-apps gui based on pitunes and I think it has some potential.
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/54716352/147608774-1a7c02da-da19-427c-8666-9bda8fbd568e.mp4

[jay-flo]

I appreciate the rapid response. I can't say that I'm familiar with yad, but I did just have a quick look at it and it is very impressive that it can do as much as it does. The mock-up you've done with the dual-pane looks nice. I'm sure there are a lot of constraints to what can or can't be accomplished. I don't know how flexible the yad scripting language is, or how much control you can exercise in the appearance of your GUI. Keep up the good work!

[theofficialgman]

I was going to say that yad is actually a "relatively" simple project with an easy to understand codebase
https://github.com/v1cont/yad
but then I looked more into it and realized I really don't know GTK+(GTK3) well and have no clue how to add "tiling" to the windows it produces
I think it would be a cool concept for a PR to yad but I've got no expertise or knowledge of where to start

[Crilum]

@Botspot A dual pane window would make it eaiseir to add more buttons to the toolbar, right? Maybe we could add a refresh button.. 👀

Could the toolbar be a separate window?

[Painadath]

So will it be possible if some one among us could modify yad to have support of the above mentioned features