Re: one-panel-approach

[Fernando <ferkiwi gmail com>]

Am Montag, den 13.04.2009, 17:20 -0400 schrieb Feng Yu:
> Please at least give an option to leave that blank blank for other
> usages, If it is to be occupied by the task list.
>
> A plugin system like what we have in Gnome Panel would be really nice
> to defer the solution of the conflicts to the end users: every
> proposed usage can be implemented as a plugin.

I think that I have to agree about the task bar. It's hard to think of
a replacement of it.
Trying to innovate just for the sake of innovation is not going to
improve usability.

Well.. but I have to admit that I don't use the task bar at all... I
normally just alt-tab using the keyboard, but I'm afraid that there
are a lot of people who like the mouse much more than I do. There's
hardly something more usable for the mouse than a bar of buttons that
you just have to click to switch to the desired window directly.

Perhaps... mouse gestures would be an interesting approach. it would
also be useful for touchscreens to have a set of gestures that
activate events in the window manager. I believe that sooner or later
a gesture system would be needed.

And about the top panel... something that I think it would be nice to
have in that blank space is the name assigned to the current
workspace. There's no fast visual way to know what workspace are you
using. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but if there are going to
be rules for specific workspaces with specific names the top panel
would be a good place to show/configure some of this information.
Also.. there are other things that are missing in the panel.. the
clock format should be something like "%a %d %b [%H:%M]" there's also
missing the weather report.. and the functionality of the gnome-panel
clock.

Most of the other gnome-panel applets functionalities are capable to
be reimplemented as just tray icons, I believe. Perhaps it's not
really needed a plugin system specific to the panel, as long as the JS
API is flexible enough.

But well.. thats just my unexperienced opinion.

--
Fernando