Re: What does gnome-shell give us?

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2009-10-02 at 15:52 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> 
> 
> > All right, I'm not trying to troll here.  But I'm working very
> > hard on revamping the user experience in Yelp to keep it more
> > focused on the content you're looking at.  Yelp would be very
> > broken if it were constrained to a single workspace.  In fact,
> > Yelp windows should generally feel more like utility windows
> > than a part of the Yelp application.
> >
> > It's important to me to know design points like this.  I've
> > seen precious little communication about this sort of stuff.
> > I see whizbang screencasts from time to time, but I haven't
> > really seen real dialog about the user experience that we're
> > trying to create, especially with respect to how it impacts
> > the rest of the desktop.
> 
> Quite possibly, yelp is simply not an application in this design, but
> just a part of the system that provides help.

Indeed.  So I have this set of APIs to develop against and
this set of expectations about application behavior and
interaction with the desktop as a whole.  My expectations
are based on eight or so years of experience with Gnome 2.

So what I'm looking for is some communication about how we
expect applications to behave, how they will interact with
the desktop, and what concrete things I need to do if the
default interaction just does not work for my program.

Maybe it would be good to have a whitepaper or some sort of
design documentation.  As I mentioned in my blog post [1],
I will be available at the Summit to help anybody with any
documentation they bring to me.  I can't write it, because
I don't know the answers.  But I can help people ask the
right questions.

[1]
http://blogs.gnome.org/shaunm/2009/09/30/documentation-at-the-summit/

--
Shaun