User interface suggestion for panels

[William McVey <wam cisco com>]

First, I'd like to say that I'm very happy with the panel's current
functionality and usability; however, I think there are a couple
things that could make it even better.  Last night I stumbled across
http://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html, which gives a good
description of various user interface problems with the Apple Dock.
It occurred to me that a couple of the noted deficiencies in the Dock
also exist in the Gnome panel.  In particular:

9.  Dock objects have no labels 

This can be an issue when a user has a panel full of similar launchers
(for example, to launch remote connections to various hosts),
multiple menus or multiple drawers.  The issue is also very apparent
when monitoring applets are in use, since it can be very difficult to
distinguish the various resources being monitored (Load, Swap, Network
Traffic, etc) since the applets all look similar.  It might be nice to
add a panel option to allow the user to specify a small text description
printed near the panel icon.

4.  The Dock ignores Fitts's Law  
(Fitt's law is described at 
http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.html#fitts's%20law)

Even when the panel has been configured to:
    -	not have hide buttons,

    -	to make the buttons flush with the panel edge, and

    -	to have 0 padding between the applets and the panel border

there still seems to be a 1 or 2 pixel gap between the very far
edge of the screen and the buttons within a panel.  This is apparent
when you "throw the mouse to the corner", and even though it might
look as if the you're on a launcher, the mouse is actually in a
no-mans land (perhaps it's the beveled edge that is insensitive?).
It would seem that making this area active to button presses
would speed things up quite a bit (this is covered in detail at
http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html).

  -- William

P.S.  I'm not a member of the gnome-hackers gnome org mailing list, so if
this turns into a thread of discussion, please keep me on the cc: list.