As it currently stands, you need to add the “Haiku menu”. Drop the deskbar system or user folder onto one of the tabs, a new icon will appear which responds to the secondary click by showing a menu similar to the Deskbar’s one.
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I think I’ve figured out why the localisation was never finalized… the way the wordclock is designed makes any translation almost impossible
(btw in Italian, too).
I’m inclined to say that the wordclock must be changed or even better completely eliminated as it does not add much value to me.
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Nice work at all.
Could you please update the bitmap icon to a haiku vector file. As far as i see it it would be the Deskbar icon and the tick-overlay like it is used for example for the default printer. But i don’t know if it is that easy.
I would avoid disabling it altogether as there may be someone using it. What is the most idiomatic way to disable a feature if the language is not set to English?
IMHO, as it is now, it would be only useful with text to speech. It’s too long to read anyway.
So, I would replace it with something more easy to translate. Something like " Today we are %date" It’s %time"
I haven’t used Dockbert and don’t know where this clock shows up. Doesn’t it take quite some space for a dock?
There’s also the WordClock replicant for the Desktop that may be the better choice.
IIRC, it’s a tooltip that appears when your mouse is over time/date.
Good point, I didn’t remember that.
Well, I don’t mind removing it completely. I was more concerned for those, if any, who actually use it.
@humdinger what happens if the strings are removed from the eng catkey and uploaded again on Polyglot? Will the translations be updated or invalidated?
I dont use Dockbert, because it takes a lot of space from the desktop. It can be installed only at the bottom-middle of the deskbar, IIRC, atm.
It would be better to go the BeOs way and split all the dock parts like time, date, apps and the other in parts, to use it as replicants!
I miss a small replicant that shows me the date only without hovering!
Is it time for another threat like “Date, time and Deskbar ideas”?
It has nothing to do with Dockbert improvements!
Technically not a replicant, but …
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When a string changes, Polyglot removes the old string and the new one is added. Only capitalization changes etc. are ignored, I think, as those shouldn’t impact a translation.
This would be a misuse of the capability.
Moreover, Dockbert was conceived as a replacement of the Deskbar that’s why there’s a clock, a “Be” menu (now the “Haiku” menu) and other amenities.
Splitting its components into replicants would not make any sense.
In the end, I don’t get what this alleged “BeOS way” is. I kindly remind you that Dockbert was published in the early 2000s…
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This article describes the BeOs way very well…
Go to the end of the article, and see the mail app as example for splitting or breaking big apps into small apps!
Nothing to do with replicants, I hope you get my point!
See: The Haiku Messaging System
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To be fair, that article describes the Unix way (“making simple tools that do one thing well and which can be combined with other tools”). That philosophy might have been used to implement the email apps on BeOS and Haiku, but it’s a bit of exaggeration to call it the BeOS way.
Also, here is some valid criticism of the current email apps architecture:
In practice, this never materialised.
The Haiku messaging system is clever but not enough to implement a true interop across different applications like COM or CORBA.
The Binder was supposed to bring that but we were not lucky enough to witness. Not in an official release, at least. It was introduced in BeIA and Dano.
One major drawback is that a pointer can’t trespass the boundary of the address space of an application without recurring to esoteric techniques like C++ placement new and areas. Not to mention that, to my knowledge, this is limited to C++. In other words, unlike COM, this solution is not language agnostic and particular attention should payed to thread safety.
More on this, two applications often need to notify a status change. Haiku allows for StartWatching/StopWatching and SendNotices but it would require an intimate knowledge of how messages are handled inside the two apps, defeating completely the purpose of the scripting suites.
Let’s look at the Stack and Tile. The tiling subsystem has severe limitations, one for all the lack of an API. In the second place, the windows can’t be tiled arbitrarily but one given window is attached to one and only one window, making it impossible to have a complex layout. For example, two windows (A and B) side by side sitting on top of another window extending from the left hand border of window A to to right hand border of window B.
This prevents one from having a well organised workspace by “composing” apps together.
In the end, we should be cautious when preaching the “BeOS way”.
Well, especially when It is mainly Haiku stuff…
Binder works on Android, no?
In any case we can improve on our design, we are not forced to keep it the way it is. I would reckon the main reason that there is no api to tile yourself with another app is that nobody bothered to add it yet. There is no technical reason this doesn’t exist.
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Especially in this case, when Dockbert apparently doesn’t aim for that elusive “BeOS way”, but rather goes for the “MacOS dock way”. 
Well, Dockbert seems more like AmiDock to me. Is this an “Amiga way”? Did we close the circle then? 
Hmm, know what, I confused it with HiQDock… 
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