RE: Zooming dock

[David Grega <webmaster overtech zzn com>]

I admit, the finder menu was fairly useful (before MacOS X) and something 
similar to it should be implemented into Gnome - or at least improve the 
taskbar to replace the finder menu.

As for the apple menu, it was a great idea - I don't know why the heck they 
remmed it in MacOS X.  Novices knew if they touched that menu, they were 
doing some configuration stuff and that's bad for them to do since they'd 
probably screw it up.  I liked the very clear distinction between programs 
and configuration - something that should be implemented into Gnome.

- Azkard

----------
From:  delmar watkins
Sent:  Monday, December 11, 2000 12:08 PM
Cc:  gnome-gui-list gnome org
Subject:  Re: Zooming dock

<<File: smime.p7s>>The zooming dock is really cool because it allows Fitt's 
law to be used,
while also keeping the dock relatively small.

The 'Desk Guide' thing is really not that great of an example of the dock:
the dock is more like the WindowMaker dock or the Enlightenment Iconbox.

The cool thing about the Enlightenment Iconbox is that it can take a 
snapshot
of your window as an icon, but the problem is if you have 3 terminals open,
it is hard to distinguish between them, which actually LESSENS their 
impact.
WindowMaker has the good idea of putting a little title bar on each 
iconized
window, which (when coupled with the naming of gnome terms that was 
discussed
a week or so ago) would make the Enlightenment iconbox SOOOO easy to use.

Also, maybe having a little standard icon/watermark for the app in one of 
the
corners would help (a little netscape 'stamp' or 'watermark' in one corner 
of
every netscape icon??)

Personally, I think that a gnome iconbox, a la the Enlightenment iconbox 
but
better, would greatly help the GUI.  espectially if you added features that
the gnome toolbar/MacOS Dock have, like allowing groups of 
aliases/shortcuts
(like 'drawers' of shortcvuts), shortcuts to folders that you could drag 
and
drop into, gnome applets, etc. etc. etc.  There are a lot of things that 
can
be done with the dock that I think apple is going to do...

(OFF TOPIC, KINDA)  I realized this weekend that the dock is actually a
pretty slick implementation of a lot of the mac ideas.  It basically
synthesizes the finder menu in the mac's upper right, the apple menu of the
upper left, the desktop icons, and the tabbed finder menus (if you haven't
seen these, then don't ever use a mac, 'cause as soon as you see them, you
will not want to use linux again....).  The dock is a way to keep all of 
this
stuff in ONE cool interface, and follow a lot of the user interface
suggestions that people have had:  make it all consistent, follow fitts' 
law,
etc.

The thing is, I think it would be pretty easy for gnome to follow suit. 
 The
new GUI for MacOSX is actually pretty darn sweet, and even if we had the
FUNCTIONALITY without the 'genie effect' wiz-bang, we would still be ahead 
of
the game.

William Kendrick wrote:

> Mark said:
> >   I was wondering what peoples opinion of a zooming dock is. I haven't
> > used MacOS X, but I would imagine it work similarly to what the video
> > shows on their site. Icons would represent thumbnails of the 
application
> > specific content,
>
> Well, we already have something like this.
>
> As of approx. version 0.4 of Gnome's "Desk Guide" applet shows thumbnails
> of windows, a la the pager in Enlightenment.  (The one thing it doesn't 
do
> (yet) is zoom-in when you hover the mouse over a thumbnail :) )
>
> Also, Eazel's "Nautilus" GUI shell shows thumbnails of document content
> when you're navigating around your filesystem.  (ie, thumbnails of 
images,
> the first few lines of text from text files, etc.  One suggestion I had
> when I saw Nautilus presented at SVLUG was to have oscilloscope views
> of sound files, so you could start recognizing them by the shape of the
> sound... or, at the least, tell which MP3 is louder than another,
> for example. ;) )
>
> -bill!
>
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