foobar (menubar) suggestions

[Jonathan LaCour <gte079i prism gatech edu>]

Gnomers/Hackers,

I have a few suggestions after using GNOME for a long time now relating
to the foobar (A.K.A the menu panel).

    1. Integrate the little "rounding" effect from Ximian GNOME into the
    mainstream GNOME CVS.  Not only is this really cool, its a nice
    addition, albeit a little silly one.

    2. The Mac-like task list that is on the far right of the menu panel
    is absolutely wonderful, but I have a few niggles here:

        a. There is no ability to right click on a task in the list for
        more options (i.e. hide, show, move to next workspace, etc).

        b. For those of us running X with Xinerama, having to move our
        mouse pointers all the way from monitor one to the upper right
        hand corner of monitor two just to get a task list is absurd.
        For now I simply waste screen real estate by having an extra
        panel with the standard Tasklist applet. 

            - This could be solved by placing an extra task menu in the
            center of the menu panel so that both screens will have a
            task list in the upper right.

            - This could also be solved by making the task menu an
            applet like it probably (read: definately) should be. I do
            not think that it is currently an applet.

        c. Currently, every window is shown in the list, including
        dialog boxes.  I think that the option to only show the topmost
        window of each application would be wise to have. The task menu
        was inspired by Macintosh, and this is how Macintosh does it:
        one entry per app.  In my mind, this would make the task menu
        *far* more usable.  Currently, when I am GIMPing about, it gets
        very cluttered.  I place my GIMP palette and images in the left
        monitor and all the open palettes and dialogs in the right
        monitor.  Imagine the list when this is going on!

    3. This has been brought up before, but now I can safely say "KDE
    does it", which seems to be the ultimate motivator when it comes to
    the GNOME project =)  I would love it if the foobar would grab the
    menubar of the active application ala' Macintosh OS.  This is a
    wonderful usability enhancement, saves screen real estate, and
    localizes tasks to one familiar place.  I believe that I have seen a
    crude patch come over the list to do this at some point.  Anyone
    know what happened to this feature?  Is it planned to be added
    before the next dot-oh?

    4. Has anyone seen the very cool transparent menus that KDE is
    putting in?  This would be a cool addition for the jaw-drop factor
    (not more usable by any means, but still cool).  Check it out at the
    following URL: [http://www.mosfet.org/transmenu.html].  (ignore this
    suggestion if you like, I just thought it was kinda neat, albeit a
    dirty hack).

Thats it.  Good work on GNOME 1.4!  Its really coming along, although I
am one of those people that feel that the GNOME desktop will only be
truly mature once 2.0 is out (bonobo everywhere!).

In the Brotherhood of the Foot,

Jon

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Jonathan LaCour       | Software Developer   | Delta Chi at Georgia Tech
Home: 770.319.6388    | VertiSoft, Corp      | President - "A"
Cell: 678.428.8746    | Work: 770.640.5587   | president gt deltachi net
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