Re: Gnome-Shell Proposed Mock Up

[Bob Mesibov <mesibov southcom com au>]

(1) Just as an experiment, I've been watching and feeling my mouse-hand as it moves the mouse cursor quickly to various places on the screen. I'm right-handed. Here's a list of end-points in decreasing order of ease-of-reaching:

Left edge, center
Right edge, center
(Top edge, center; top left corner)
Top right corner
(Bottom left corner, bottom edge middle)
Bottom right corner

All these places are easy to reach with my eyes, but my eyes don't interact with the screen - my hand does. If my hand has to go to any of the last 3 positions on this list to get some functionality, my hand will be unhappy. The only comfortable hot corner for this right-hander is top left.

(2) Most screens these days are wide and some are very wide, which means putting most control functions in either a right- or left-hand panel (choice should be available) is just good sense. The Gnome Shell design seems to respect this by taking control functions out of the skinny top and bottom panels and putting them in a new area which extends from screen left. Can someone explain to me, then, why there are still those skinny top and bottom panels in the default design?

(3) I think this has been argued before here, but I don't think auto-hiding something important, like an application or window switcher, is a good idea. If I want to change windows, I don't want to have to go on a voyage of discovery first.

(4) ++++1 to hills' comment:

"The center of all user activity is application window. When designing GNOME
Shell please do not think about documents. From user perspective document is in
fact application window with some content, it is useful because user can open it
in some application window. Users most of they time do not think or care about
documents that are on they computers but are not open."

Bob