How can anyone see Network C…, Network P…, Network P… in the preference panel and not wonder if the truncation is too agressive?
Besides, truncation in OS X is much much smarter:
Notice how the tracking (spacing between letters) in the first item gets tightened to make it fit? It looks a little squished, but it's much preferable to reading dots.
The last item had to be truncated, but it happens in the middle and keeps the useful end information visible.
I was being honest when I said I was amazed at the GNOME truncation. I think an operating system UI that can't handle the names of its killer apps (e.g., OpenOffic…) lost its way somewhere.
Don't forget Apple (among others) has tons of silly patents regarding text rendering that Gnome developers have to program around while everybody else can just cross-license with their own silly little patents. It may be possible they simply cannot afford the risk of doing the obvious thing.
Do you actually know that Gnome is actively "code around" some alleged patent violation?
Programming around any imaginable patent violation actually seems really bad, especially given that software patents aren't looking as strong as they once were. I vaguely Linus or someone saying it's better not to research existing patents, it limits your liability. But just on the principle of letting corporations covertly bully you, it seems bad. It seems much better to force the companies sue you and see what happens.
My googling shows Apple has a patent on the App-bar but there are plenty of App-bars out-there. Red-hat apparently was worried to remove a dock but the screen shots we see here clearly show something like a dock. But even thread discussing that situation sounded murky. Docky still seems to be distributed for example.
Apple has patent on "Open Type" but that also is used heavily in Linux.
I oppose that Free-type patents like all software patents but they don't scare me too much because sub-pixel rendering's value is debatable and it's not something that should affect programming at a higher level.
On the other hand, in the context of the thread, when rbanffy said "Don't forget Apple (among others) has tons of silly patents regarding text rendering that Gnome developers have to program around", in response to "truncation in OS X is much much smarter", he seemed to imply there were patents on the level of simply truncating text.
Are there?
If there are, it sound horrible.
Well, if this is wide-spread, I find frustrating, even infuriating that it only appears in bits and pieces rather than there being a large "this is what software patents are imposing on us". The worst possible thing is to let this happen silently.
Yeah, I thought it looked pretty obvious because it was so bad it just hadn't been gotten to.
While I can't articulate on whether pango's ellipsizing is as smart as Apple's, it should be as simple as changing a single property from PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_END to PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_MIDDLE.