Re: Main Menu mockup

["John Stowers" <john stowers lists gmail com>]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 11:57 AM, Matthew McGowan <matthew joseph mcgowan gmail com> wrote:

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...

Hmm, not so much for me (debian unstable)...

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "mocker.py", line 986, in <module>
    mocker.build_mockup( Stage )
  File "mocker.py", line 57, in build_mockup
    content=ExitContent()
  File "mocker.py", line 404, in __init__
    padding=10
  File "mocker.py", line 819, in __init__
    Widget.__init__(self, w, h, Style.button)
TypeError: __init__() takes exactly 7 arguments (4 given)

John

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


Regards,
Matthew McGowan

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