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Hi all, This is my first post on this mailing list. More than a year I'm subscribed and receiving posts but never sent anything because I believe that people should write something only when they have some, more or less, valuable thoughts. For the purpose of this short introduction, I'm software developer learning about open source in my spare time because I really like this business model and believe it is superior than others. Newest release of GNOME I have been waiting for a long time caused different emotions to me. I realize that GNOME would like to enter into Netbook/Tablet market segment because this is very lucrative one, but to be fair to the "legacy" users and for the purpose of better future GNOME development, I believe that user experience might be better. Here I identified some issues I found while I was using GNOME3: 1. I believe that Ubuntu Unity did a good job introducing Document-oriented environment, same as we could see in Apple Mac OS X. GNOME3 pretty much wastes space in this area. 2. Default window theme has very thick Title bar, again wasting screen space. This issue becomes even more important if we want to run GNOME3 on tablets. 3. Whole user experience is (as it looks to me) designed for touch-screens. Normal desktop/laptop users find this design less friendly than old one. Following issue is not directly related to GNOME3, but just my idea I would like to see implemented and believe software developers and professional users would find it very useful. While I'm not 'reinventing the wheel' I still believe it is new idea. Proposal. I have been using keyboard-oriented computers for almost 20 years. During this time, I believe, keyboards are segment where we saw very little innovation. 101-keys US keyboard is a standard we could see everywhere with very small differences. Win keys, AltGr and dropping numerical keyboard are very few modifications of this old standard. I believe that this fact is a consequence of one very mature well-designed input device. I would say I wish I could only use a keyboard as my computer input device. For all this time we have old command prompt text interface as the fastest way how software developer could "communicate" with computer. We are also living in graphic-oriented displays and such technology is very useful so we cannot depend on text interface any more. However, mouse as an input device is not very fast tool. We have to move hands, to concentrate to mouse-pointer, etc. My idea is whether we could develop one "command prompt"-oriented window where we could communicate with all our applications? I know, you will tell me, about xterm, and other similar emulators, but this emulator allows us just to use bash,csh and other shells, not to communicate with other applications. I propose some application where we could type commands like "\calc\open .\myfile" for opening file in calc or "\gimp\line x1 y1 x2 y2" for drawing line in gimp, for example, and do all things we are doing currently with shortcuts or clicking to icons or to menu items. I realize that each application has to have support for this feature, but for all of us using computers daily this way of interaction would make mouse and other pointer devices completely useless and all communication could be done much faster from keyboard only. Text commands are simple, fast, and very comprehensive way for doing anything and graphic environment could provide us picture/video and all other tools we don't have in plain-text environment. As a consequence all windows and applications could be menu/icon/dialog-free so we could have more space for a real job need to be done when we use them. And my final thought is related to Google Chromebook. We could see that Google is trying to redefine keyboard making it simpler and more useful than it is currently. I think that such idea is great. Lot of "garbage" computer history collected all these years and somebody has to "clean" it a little bit. Win keys and some of ASCII characters today doesn't have any sense. Ctrl and Alt are more than enough for giving users more options for typing. That is all from me, so far. If you like my ideas we could start working on it, and I will start proposing more things, if you don't I will be passive observer and in future contributor to other well-established GNOME projects. Uros Nedic, MSc Belgrade, Serbia |