maemo.org - Talk - Tag-based Menu for N900 applications

Brainstorm:
http://maemo.org/community/brainstor..._applications/

The default N900 application menu doesn't have categories for applications. After installing some applications it becomes a little cluttered. Hence, there are currently MyMenu and Catorize to help sorting things out, with sub-menus.

Both applications have different approaches. While MyMenu has an (manually updated?) list of applications, Catorise uses maemo repository categories as sub-menu names. Using any of them seems to be better than the default N900 configuration. However, there are still things that could be better arranged.

For instance: when one wants to quickly check up the status of his or her wifi connection, he or she might want to use WifiInfo. But it is not located in the Network sub-menu. Rather, it is on Utilities.

There have been suggestions to create yet another menu organizer, using KDE, GNOME, or Freedesktop.org menu categories. While this effort could somewhat help with the problem of placing an application in a good sub-menu or category, it still doesn't solve some disambiguation problems. WifiInfo, for instance, is a Utility and it is also a Network utility. Where to place it?

The idea is then to use tags for sub-menus. When the user goes to sub-menu Network, he or she will find everything that has the Network tag. When he or she goes to sub-menu Text Editor, she might find Leafpad, Conboy, Vim, etc.

A tag-based menu system seems to be a fast and great way to find the application you are looking for. Moreover, it seems to be the best way to see what applications are available for the task at hand.

What you think?