Prototyping navigation in Epiphany

[Felipe Erias Morandeira <femorandeira igalia com>]

Hi,

I have implemented a small prototype of the proposed navigation for
Epiphany, as described in https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Web

The basic idea is that open tabs are placed in a horizontal list, with
the last visited ones on the left.

You would click on a thumbnail to open the web page; from there,
clicking on "Pages" would take you back to the overview of open pages.

I have also implemented an alternative UI where the open pages are
arranged in a 2D grid.


For comparison with the existing solution, this is the command line
command to open the same set of tabs in Epiphany:

    epiphany -n                  \
        www.reddit.com           \
        www.fsf.org              \
        www.gnome.org            \
        www.google.com           \
        www.mozilla.org          \
        www.freedesktop.org      \
        www.igalia.com           \
        www.webkitgtk.org        \
        www.webkit.org           \
        www.amateurgourmet.com   \
        www.reddit.com/r/cooking \
        www.reddit.com/r/funny


This application has limited functionality because its goal is only to
quickly test a very specific behaviour. Specifically:
  - the list of pages is hardcoded
  - frequently opened pages are not displayed under the open tabs
list, as the design calls for
  - "Recent", "Favorites"... do not work
  - when a website is open, only following links and "Pages" work


You can grab the code here:
  http://people.igalia.com/femorandeira/files/Ephy_20120530.tar.gz


The project folder includes compiled binaries that should work on, at
least, 64-bit Debian and Ubuntu. Just uncompress it and run

    cd Ephy ; ./Ephy

Note that if you want to build it yourself, you will need the qt4,
qt-webkit and qmlviewer dev.  libraries for your distribution; then,
you can just run

    make distclean ; qmake && make


The application allows for some customisation through the command line:

    --grid    :  Display open pages in a grid (default: horizontal list)
    --reorder :  Open tabs are reordered by last used
    --help    :  Print this message

./Ephy --reorder  would give you a list without reordering,
./Ephy --reorder  is the currently proposed behaviour
./Ephy --grid  would sort the open tabs in a fixed 2D grid,
./Ephy --grid --reorder  would place the last open tab at the top left
corner of the grid.


Please, let me know if this works for you. I know that using QML to
prototype GNOME applications might sound like a strange proposition,
but in this case I just wanted a quick way to test the behaviour
without writing any final code.

I am open to use a similar approach to explore the design of other
parts of GNOME.


Regards,

Felipe