Re: Features !

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 05/10/11 21:17, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> Hey,

Hi,

> so according to the draft schedule that Andre posted a while ago, we
> are in the middle of the 'feature proposal' period right now. I
> haven't seen much feature discussion here at all yet, and so far, the
> wiki only lists things that I have put there, which is a little scary
> - I can't be the only one itching to get cool things into GNOME 3.4.
>
> Where are your ideas ? It would be great to get them onto that wiki
> page, in particular since next weekend a bunch of us will get together
> in Montreal to, among other things, spend time to talk about 3.4
> features.

I certainly have some ideas to improve things for my user experience. 
Most of them are general so perhaps we should have a general page from 
the link you gave previously.

In any case, here are my thoughts:

- Don't show the accessibility menu unless needed. I never use this menu 
and I don't doubt some people do, but it seems quite redundant for me 
and likely a lot of people.

- Disconnection between the telepathy accounts and the "Online Accounts" 
is disappointing to me. Like the N9, I want all my online accounts like 
Twitter, Facebook, XMPP, MSN, etc. To all be configurable via the Online 
Accounts. I heard there was some reason for this not being the case so 
far, but I don't know the details.

- The "Switch User" and "Log Out" ... menu options seem quite pointless 
if I am the only user on my machine.

- The "Suspend" menu option makes no sense here when I want to shut the 
thing down (on laptops), I guess this has been discussed to death so I 
don't want to start some flame war about this here. I guess it depends 
how you use the menu, I usually use this menu to restart/shutdown and 
close my laptop lid for suspend. To me, the option is never right.

- I really dislike the way that connection changes are stacked and shown 
as notifications permanently at the bottom of the screen. This is 
especially pointless if you are re-connected to the disconnected network 
you have a notification for.

- The "Applications" tab is quite bad IMO and the worse part of the 
shell. It lists all applications and it's never useful to me. Ideally, 
the list of applications would be obtained from Tracker :) - not sure 
how it's done now but it seems slow to load (takes a second or two) and 
perhaps could be cached to improve things there. I would like to see:
  - Better categorisation of them too.
  - I don't want to see 2 browsers, 3 email clients, avahi server
    browsers, archive manager, etc. I want to see a list of
    applications which are useful, like my preferred clients.
  - I want to see real titles, like "Text Editor", not "gedit".
  - I don't want to see applications like "xdiagnose" with no icon.

  Admittedly, this isn't an easy problem to solve.

- When I search for "foo", I want to use Tracker and for it to come up 
with results in a similar way to tracker-needle. That being there are 
categories listed which people can find their content in. I would link 
to a video but I don't have one right now with the current category 
view. I am blogging today about something related to needle though so ...

- I miss the weather applet, there is an extension for this, it would be 
nice to see that integrated and supported.

- I miss timezone changing in the menu as it was which was useful if you 
repeatedly went between different countries. Integration with the clock 
at the top could be done there I suspect.

- Integration with Google calendar would be nice. Actually, I am not 
sure if this works by using my google account in the "Online Accounts" 
or not because I have my private google account (which I entered there) 
and we use Google calendar internally with Lanedo (which is what I want 
to see there primarily).

- Perhaps integration of the new contacts app in the menu too (for quick 
calls/emails/IMs)

--

I love the shell generally though, this is really just where I think we 
could improve things.

--
Regards,
Martyn

Founder and CEO of Lanedo GmbH.