First reactions

[Mike Bursell <mike hingston demon co uk>]

All -

So, I've spent a couple of days using gnome-shell, and I'm slowly
getting some reading done of the mail archives, and even looking at the
Javascript code.

I'm beginning to realise that I've got a lot to learn (which is good),
but I thought it might be a good idea to give some initial feedback on
usability.  I know that we're keen to get users to use gnome-shell for a
while and get some feedback from them, and I'm keen to make this happen.
However, from my point of view, there are two major pain points that I'm
finding very annoying and which I think might put people off using
gnome-shell even for testing.

1) there's no way to launch often-used apps.  It doesn't much bother me
whether this is being able to add launchers to the panel, or for the
"Activities" menu to remember my frequently-used apps so that I can
easily click on them (or another method), but at the moment, this is
significantly slowing down how I work on my computer (or feels like it
is), and that's a pain.  t could just be a hack for now (like the
taskbar at the bottom), but I'd like to see something.  I'm trying to
use gnome-shell exclusively, and it currently hurts...
2) I know this is very much work in progress, but it would be good to
have a way to find a list of all the apps I've currently got running as
windows (a global taskbar of some type), and to be able to jump to them
without having to cycle through all the workspaces.

Would there be a way of advertising (in the UI) that certain features
are in for testing, and to ask for feedback on how they work?  There is,
of course, the danger that people might get attached to them, though...

I have to say that, despite all the discussions about how this should
all work, and the relatively early stage of the project, I find
gnome-shell stable - and feature-rich - enough to use for day-to-day
use.  This is an amazing testament to the work done by the team already,
and I'd like to express my thanks.  This is (already) a great piece of
UI, and I can see how much work and care is going into its creation.

Well done - and thanks: keep it coming!

(Please do let me know if this sort of feedback is useful...)

-Mike.