Re: Reprise of the panel layout proposal

[Rami Valta <rami valta pp inet fi>]

On 20 Jun 2001 16:15:43 -0700, James Ramsey wrote:

> Menu Panel
> ==========
> 
> **Detailed description of the menu panel**
> 
> The menu panel would have only two items: a menu
> labeled the "Main Menu" at the left end, and a menu
> labeled "Running Tasks" at the right end. 

This approach would waste quite amount of screen real estate.
 
> The "Main Menu" would be pretty much the GNOME "start"
> menu. It would have at least five entries: "Programs",
> "Settings", and "Help", "Lock screen" and "Logout".
> There should not be *much* more than five entries,
> though, maybe just a distribution or vendor-specific
> menu, if that. 

I think Programs should be a top level menu of it's own. Putting it
under another menu unnecessarily increases time to access it, and
results in a pretty deep menu hierarchy. For example, if wanted to
launch Gimp, I'd do
 "Main Menu" -> "Programs" -> "Graphics" -> "Gimp",
which is pretty clumsy.
 
> The "Running Tasks" menu would be a list of, well,
> running tasks that would be no different then what one
> gets now if one clicks on the icon at the right end of
> the current menu. However, if there were no running
> tasks, the menu would have an item, saying "No tasks
> running right now".

How about displaying currently active task name and icon in the panel
instead of "Running tasks"?
 
> Further, having the "Running Tasks" menu have an entry
> when there are no running tasks, rather than be
> totally
> empty when there are no running tasks (as it is now),
> is because 1) an empty menu is nearly invisible, so
> that a user might click on an empty "Running Tasks"
> menu and conclude that the menu does nothing or is
> broken 2) an empty menu looks wrong or broken, so that
> users who click on an empty "Running Tasks" menu and
> *do* see the speck of an empty menu might conclude
> that the menu is broken.

Display "No running tasks right now" in the panel itself, and make it
gray so that it looks like it's disabled?
 
> **Detailed description of the aligned panel with
> pager**
> 
> **Justification for the setup of this panel**
> 
> A pager of some sort is needed to navigate workspaces.

Is it automatically assumed people are going to use multiple workspaces?
-- 
- Rami Valta - rami valta pp inet fi