Re: Combined system status updates

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek gentoo org> wrote:
> On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 12:50 AM, Andreas Nilsson <lists andreasn se> wrote:
> > On 2013-05-13 16:02, Nirbheek Chauhan wrote:
> > > These look rather nice. My only concern with these wireframes is that
> > > they would make the menu far too long. Would this menu still fit on
> > > 1366x768 or 1024x600 screens in landscape mode?
> > I too was a bit shocked to see the All Possible System Menu, but realized
> > it's a very extreme case.

It's actually impossible, since airplane mode cancels out some of the
other items. Also, I don't think we're going to have the remote access
and screen sharing integration in there in the first run, which will
give us some space to assess before adding extra features.

> > Usually a menu would be top ~10 items.

If anyone is interested in this, check out the examples [1]. On a
laptop with a single user account and VPN, I count eight menu items,
for example.

> I beg to differ there! On my laptop with its default setup, I would
> see 13 items + 5 separators on the menu at all times (increasing to 14
> with updates).

Can you explain how you came up with those numbers? Do you have
multiple VPNs/Mobile Broadband connections? I'm not sure that 5
separators will even be possible...

> Do we have a mechanism for "scrolling" (or its equivalent) when the
> menu length exceeds the screen height? How would this interact with
> scroll bars inside sub-menus? Is such a mechanism desirable?

GTK+ menus can certainly scroll when they reach the limit of the
available space. I'm not sure about St ones, but that should be
possible. That said, scrolling a menu isn't a great thing and I'd like
to think that we can avoid it. According to my rough calculations, a
menu with 13 items in it (which would be pretty rare) would be about
550px tall.

Allan

[1] 
https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/shell/combined-system-status-menu-v2-examples.png