Re: Thoughts on Currently Open Applications

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 7:44 PM, Mark Curtis<merkinman hotmail com> wrote:
> Let me first apologize for the initial message, I have no idea why it showed
> up as blank
>
> As of right now, there is no bottom bar illustrating what applications are
> open, is this planning on changing?

Not in the design, no.  The functionality will be in a combination of
the overview and the notification area.

> What is the point of the application name to the right of "Activities"?
> It isn't clickable to show the other open applications,

It will act as an application menu, and likely also offer switching
between windows in that application, plus the application will be able
to customize it.

See the design PDF:
http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20090705.pdf

>I heard it was used
> to illustrate what window is active instead of relying on window decoration.
> However this argument falls apart when there are 2 or more windows open of a
> given application.

It's to illustrate what *application* is active and provide a point of
control as above. The window decoration shows you which window is
active.

> Why are the names listed in the open/favorite applications in the overlay?
> There is such a small amount of room for the name, nearly every applications
> name gets truncated.  Also, the name obscures the the dots that show how
> many windows are open.

Truncated names are something we are addressing in a few ways.  First
we're working to fix the .desktop files to have smaller names.  I have
some work on having a better expansion of the name on mouseover.

That's not the end of the story; we may have to do different things in
locales with much longer names, or perhaps adjust the design to use
more of the space by default.