Main Menu mockup

[Matthew McGowan <matthew joseph mcgowan gmail com>]

Hello gnome desktop developers,

Apologies if this is the wrong forum for such an email.

I have seen a fair bit of discussion about usability ideas for Gnome 3.  
Going by a post on planet.gnome.org, the current thinking as far as 
desktop interaction[1] seems to involve some kind of multi-functional 
left-sided panel. 

Inspired by recent discussions and a few other applications such as 
Opera and Adobe Acrobat 8, i decided to have a go at developing some of 
my own ideas and add them to the mix.  I used Clutter and python to do 
so as these tools offer a relatively easy way of layering images and 
cairo textures whilst at the same time Clutter allowed me to provide 
some degree of interactivity (which further demonstrates ideas).

You can get my main menu mockup/prototype from here:
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/123544/main-menu-mockup.tar.gz

To run my mockup you need clutter 0.8 and pyclutter installed.

My main menu mockup, i believe, offers more functionality than existing 
main menus... though i guess it is similar to the Novells Slab menu and 
Vista's Start menu(?).  It would provide a single location for browsing 
applications, friends/contacts, places, deskbar-like search, document 
history, logout options and system preferences & administration.

I believe many users would be somewhat familiar with the paradigm i 
offer as there are precedents in the software world, Adobe Acrobat 8, 
Opera, Slab, and Vista start menu and the likes of web browsers and 
Banshee which implement similar UI ideas (with regard to panel-type 
interfaces which expose application functionality).

I am no coder and i don't really know how buggy/attractive the code is, 
it runs fine on my Ubuntu 8.10 system... the main threat is missing 
icons, but i think it should handle the absence of icons gracefully...

Hopefully some of you will look at my mockup and provide some feedback 
or maybe develop some of the ideas.


Regards,
Matthew McGowan

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[1] http://live.gnome.org/Boston2008/GUIHackfest/WindowManagementAndMore