Re: Feature proposal: combined system status menu

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

Hey Allan,

first of all thanks a lot for taking the time to look into these issues

2013/4/22 Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>:
> Hi all,
>
> This is something that me, Jon and Jakub have been thinking about for
> some time, and is now at the stage where we can start to think about
> implementation. I'm proposing it as a feature for 3.10 [1].
>
> The main element of the design is to combine the sound, network,
> bluetooth, power and user menus into a single menu. This will enable
> us to resolve a number of UX issues we've encountered with the
> existing design (badness on touch, difficulties having the user name
> in the top bar, lots of complexity in some menus, like network,
> virtually none in others, like sound...).

Sorry if this goes a bit off topic, but, is the general policy now to
try to optimize for touch?

I am not sure what the criteria is with this regard and I might have
miss a public discussion about it. What are we trying to accomplish
with this whole trend towards touch? I haven't seen any successful
single UI story that works well on both touch and mouse/keyboard form
factors. Again, bear with me since I might have missed compelling
discussions about this design strategy.

I would be more than supportive if we decided to do a tablet version
of GNOME but I am slightly concerned that we are just blindly
following MS/W8 and the desire of hardware manufacturers to have
something new to ship.

I am also concerned about the message that this sends to application
developers. Should they optimize their apps for touch as well? In my
experience doing an app for a touch driven device and a kbd/pointer
one is quite a different deal.

> More details are outlined on the wiki [2]. If you do look at the
> designs, please pay particular attention to the example scenarios -
> these give a clearer idea of what the menu will actually look like.
> The designs aren't finalised yet, so comments and ideas are welcome.

My main concern while looking at the wireframes is that this would
change the fundamental way a lot of extensions work right now,
specifically I'm thinking about the MPRIS2 extension in the sound menu
that allows a very handy change of track or pause of your music which
would be a pain if done through the activities overview or the system
tray. It would be nice if we could give a heads up to the extension
developers, and also, take into account that this kind of
customization seems reasonable and critical for a certain chunk of our
user base.


> It should be said that, as with any design, there are tradeoffs here.
> There are lots of advantages to this approach (see the design page),
> but there are one or two actions that might require an extra click
> with the new design. The primary example of this is switching wifi
> networks: with the new design, this will require that you open the
> system menu, click on the wi-fi entry, and then choose the network you
> want from the control center panel (as opposed to just selecting the
> network from the menu itself).
>
> However, while switching wi-fi networks will require an extra step, I
> actually think that the the experience will be better with the new
> design. The current network menu contains a lot of information that
> isn't related to wi-fi, and isn't exactly straightforward to use - in
> many respects, the new design will be more straightforward to use,
> even if there is an extra click involved. Also, we are planning a new
> wi-fi selection dialog, which should be a big improvement in those
> situations where you are not already connected to a network.

Sounds areas worth exploring, keep up the good work guys and thanks
for sharing your plans on ddl!

--
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz