Re: Revisiting the GNOME Panel in general...

[Tristan Buckmaster <tristan buckmaster gmail com>]

(Sorry if this is a duplicate, I am not sure if my first one sent. 
Also in this post I have explained what the icons on the right of the
seperator  on the bottom panel of the mock screenshots are, which I
did not explain in the original post)

I have made some gimp mock ups of the ideas I posted to this forum in
early August (the ideas have since been modified).

http://sng.its.monash.edu.au:9876/18518559/demo1c.png
http://sng.its.monash.edu.au:9876/18518559/demo2c.png

All the icons on the bottom panel that have arrows are applications
that are currently running.  The icons on the left of the seperator
which don't have
arrows are not running and if you click on them they will launch (Mac
OS X like).   An icon on the right of the seperator appears if you
open an application that is not on the left.  Icons on the right
disappear after the application closes.  If you drag an icon from the
right to the left of the seperator it will be saved and you can use it
as a launcher.

There are three different behaviours when you click on
an icon with an arrow depending on the situation, they are:

Default for one window application

Left click:  Maximises window and brings it to focus
Right click:  Pop-up menu with items; Maximise, Minimise, Close, Move
to Workspace and so forth

Default for multiple window application

Left click: Brings up a Popup menu with a list of all the windows
associated from which you can select one to be Maximised and brought
to focus (Seen in demo1c.png).
Right click:  Pop-up menu with the items;  Maximise all windows,
Minimise all windows, Close all windows and so forth

Application with an applet associated have the operations of left and
right click overloaded by the applet (Seen in demo2c.png)

The other new thing is the window list in the top panel.  It only
shows the windows associated with the application in focus.  If you
middle click on one of the windows it will bring that window to focus
and minimise all other windows associated with the application.  The
new window list will remove the need for tabbed based applications and
allows applications that were tabbed based the ability to copy and
pasted between windows.  For more dicussion on the reasons behind this
window list read my posts in early August.  Also we should give the
user to have to old tasklist if they really want it instead of the new
window list.

Finally you could have a new area like the notification area dedicated
to hardware.  This would contain applets like the mixer applet,
battery life, netword applet, etc and there would be an easy to use
popup window that would allow you to configure what hardware applets
to show.