Re: Taskbar replacement

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 10:15 PM, Onyeibo Oku <twohotis gmail com> wrote:
> That's the idea!
>
> I tend to see this as something that should happen outside of 'activities'
> mode.  This does not diminish the importance of the 'Activities' mode
> however ... which is still better for an overview and workspace management.
> Now that I see that it is possible ... next is, will it be accepted by Gnome
> in general?  What is the right channel/process?

Talk to the designers! Most of this stuff is discussed on IRC: you
want to go to #gnome-design and #gnome-shell. Most of these people are
on the east coast, so we're in EST. Usually you can bounce ideas off
of each other about how best to do this, and have a lot of fun getting
a mockup down.

> I still don't get what you mean by 'look-alike window decorations'.  Is that
> it?  Looks so much like what I had in mind though.

"Window decorations" include the one pixel border for the resize
cursor and title bar that are drawn outside the regular window. The
window itself doesn't draw this right now, gnome-shell/mutter do. We
can't really put the actual window title bar for the reasons I
mentioned before, so we'll have to draw title bars that look exactly
like the regular title bars, but are really a separate thing. I think
Giovanni is working on porting the window title bars over to Clutter,
so this will probably help a bunch.


> On 03/20/2011 11:25 PM, Jasper St. Pierre wrote:
>
> On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 5:22 PM, Onyeibo Oku <twohotis gmail com> wrote:
>
> On 03/20/2011 10:11 PM, Jasper St. Pierre wrote:
>
> Because the mockup/screenshot took a minute or two to come up, here's
> a mirror: http://i.imgur.com/MPqe2.png
>
> Thanks man
>
> Most people who are asking for a "taskbar" are really asking for an
> easier way to switch windows. Speaking on my own, I really, really
> like this idea, with a few caveats:
>
> :)
>
> 1) I don't like the way you trigger it: it will probably frustratng
> that touching the top of the screen by accident is a bit 'destructive'
> in terms of workflow, but that can be fixed.
> 2) It's a bad idea that all the window close buttons are lined up like
> that, so we should probably hide the close button on all windows but
> the current one.
> 3) What happens with skinny windows? Will they just have a really,
> really big title bar? What about windows that have a specified max
> size?
>
> Very genuine considerations.  Any ideas? I mean, for me the concept of
> emerging title bars is what I'm marketing here. I didn't consider details.
>
> Having the "title bar" be a lookalike would probably be better: when
> you trigger it, a window list of lookalike window decorations, without
> close buttons, slides down, 'pushing' the current window down, and
> selecting a window fades the real window you selected in.
>
> I'm trying to paint a mental picture of your description but its blurry.
> Could you make a sketch?  A rough pencil sketch should get my rusty
> imaginative capabilities back online.  Then I might be able to enhance it.
>
> Just spent 20-30 minutes making this: http://jsfiddle.net/tmcvN/2/
>
>