who wud benefit from desktop shortcuts - i know i wudnt mind a few

I'm not sure how I feel about those... I think they'd definately cause a lot of clutter. Given the scale of the 770 it's not like you'd have 40+ apps installed at a given time. (And if you did, you're probably nuts enough to know where each one of them is in the menu tree) What might be cool is a customizable quick launcher (for example, I don't use the e-mail client... but it's always sitting there staring at me)

yeah - obviously not as madly as some ppl on their xp desktop - where every program has a shortcut - but like a few at the bottom in small buttons

some of the applets - like the email one u mention, are a bit pointless - like the brightness of the screen - who changes that often?? - and some ppl dont want the bluetooth there either. surely the net and bluetooth indicators could be built in together?

I change the brightness very very often. Using the 770 indoors - mid brightness. Outdoors doing the café thing - max brightness. In bed as an ebook reader (with streaming radio) - min brightness. It's very useful.

But I agree that it should be configurable

actually - i agree- i change it a lot now too - i mix between very dim when using the internet - then very bright for watching movies

If you want some extra application buttons in an easily accessible place, and if you don't mind using an application I customized just for myself and thus isn't very "usable" in the HCI sense of the sense, then you can try out my customized version of the loadplugin script, which I call loadplugin-run.

It's basically the same as the original loadplugin, except with an additional option called "Run...", which acts like the "Run..." button on a normal operating system - you can run arbitrary shell commands with it.

Plus, you can (optionally) save particular commands for use later - it adds them to the loadplugin menu.

I use it mostly to turn on/off things, like swap. I have 4 saved commands that I can access from the loadplugin menu:
* Toggle MMC2
* Toggle SSHD
* Toggle Swap
* Toggle NFS Mount

And each of the commands is linked to a script that checks if the thing (e.g. Swap) is already on; if so, it turns it off; otherwise, it turns it on.

I'd post screenshots or the contents of my shell scripts, but I'm at work and don't have access to a WAP in order to pull the data from my Nokia 770, but if you guys are interested, I can post that when I get home in a few hours.

It's not complete yet - for example, you can't yet change or remove previously saved run commands without using gconftool-2 on the command line (or via the "Run..." menu, I guess; all the gconf keys are in "/apps/loadplugin"), and you have to reboot in order to see those manual changes.

Also, there's no threading involved, and the command is run in the GDK thread, so if it's a long-running command (like mounting an NFS share), it will hang the entire Hildon UI until it finishes - not really a big deal, since most of the things I use it for are quick.

Since I found that I use this mostly for toggling things, I plan on changing the UI to make it more of a "Status" tool, e.g. turning the plain menu items into "checkbox" menu items where the check tells you the status (e.g. "is swap on?"), and "toggling" the checkbox would change the status. I'll probably implement that sometime next week.

But since your discussion sort of fits with the use case of loadplugin-run, I thought I'd offer it up to you guys in case you were curious.

Oh yeah, and one more thing about loadplugin-run. I also modified the memory calculations to be a little more accurate and to take swap into account - it's much more reflective of actual memory state now.

In fact, as you run more and more applications, you can watch the memory indicator on loadplugin-run increase into the red, then immediately decrease as applications get the "Low Memory" message from DBUS (which I conclude means that they're cleaning up cached data in order to free up memory - very cool). This is distinct from linux's file system cache, which is really close enough to "free memory" that it is often considered such (as is the case with loadplugin [em]and[/em] loadplugin-run).

Yes, please do....