Re: All GNOME Shell Developers.

[Juan Manuel Santos <vicariousdm gmail com>]

On Friday 18 December 2009 19:29:54 Ryan Peters wrote:
> A dock, like someone suggested (AWN, Cairo Dock and Docky are nice), is
> a great idea. AWN 0.4 beta can even be set to work/look like a standard
> panel.
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-shell-list mailing list
> gnome-shell-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
> 

I'm in favor of this idea. In fact, it has become almost defacto behaviour for 
me to have a Cairo-AWN-like dock in my everyday desktop. I use Cairo on my  
desktop and AWN on my notebook (since the Intel card on my notebook makes 
using Cairo quite impossible, at least nowadays). I've found there's no 
easiest and fastest way to change between apps, with the only possible 
exception of keeping one main app per desktop and switching between desktops 
with my keyboard (and remembering which app is in which desktop, and 
remembering the desktop map in my mind, but that's just something I do because 
i'm quite crazy :-)

Sure, the dock can become quite crowded sometimes if you can't get the hang of 
it, but nevertheless it can be a way of seeing what apps you have open, even 
in all desktops at the same time. Hell, I've switched to KDE4 a few months ago 
and neither KDE's default shiny taskbar nor win7-like stasks were able to 
replace Cairo. It just feels natural now to me.

Regarding the app-launching, I agree with what has been said that the app menu 
is meant for discovering. There's also no fastest way to launch an app (as 
long as you have your hands in your keyboard) than an intuitive, semantic 
search box (much like Gnome-DO, Krunner or Kupfer are). I believe someone has 
already mentioned on the list the benefits of using the keyboard to do things 
instead of the mouse, one of the major ones being speed improvement. I also 
believe that the search box should become something like Gnome-DO: not only a 
launcher but also a place where you can do things with your keyboard that 
would take several mouse clicks and movements instead.

0.02

cheers

Juan Manuel