Re: GNOME Panel++

["Alberto Ruiz" <aruiz gnome org>]

2007/9/24, Benjamin Gramlich <benjamin gramlich gmail com>:

I think that the gnome-panel could benefit very much from a redesign
that would blend the OSX dock concept with its current UI. Maybe
blending some of gimmie's great ideas with some of SLED's improvements.
Gimmie would need to be implemented in C, though, wouldn't it?

Such a change should be done carefully, but I absolutely agree with you that the change is needed.

Right now the panel has some drawbacks:

  * There's no clear difference from a user point of view between an applet, a launcher and notification icons.
  * We put a lot of stuff on the panel as applets because we don't really have anywhere else to put it.
  * We're waisting a lot of space with the task bar applet. People don't really care about the title of the window unless they have more than one window per app (more than one window with the same icon). And for this case, we're already grouping them.

I kind of like the Mac OS X/Window Maker approach. One app, one icon even if there are multiple windows per app. Each time you click on the icon, all the windows of that app raise on top. And if you right click on the icon, yo get the list of all windows as a popup menu (the same we're doing when grouping windows in one entry on the task bar).

This approach also allows to avoid the need for a notification area, since the icon can be used to represent states. The avant window navigator has some example of this, I've seen some screenshots of awn showing the album cover of rhythmbox while playing, can't remember where though.

I think that awn+gimme is the way to go. However, the fact that awns needs hardware acceleration is kind of a show stopper I guess.
-- 
Un saludo,
Alberto Ruiz