Re: Mockup of overlay layout changes

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le dimanche 22 février 2009 à 04:14 +0100, Sander Dijkhuis a écrit :
> I made a small mockup of a different overlay layout:
> http://student.science.uva.nl/~sqdh/gs-mockup/
> It is mostly a change of positioning, and a different way of switching between
> the different overlay views.  Of couse only code can tell whether this works
> better than the current design, but I thought it would be fun and maybe even
> useful to create this mockup first.
While your ideas are very interesting, I'm still not convinced that your layout would be more efficient. First, I fear that the overlay mode will never be as easy to use as the task switcher, and thus I'd prefer to reach more quickly the applications area than the workspaces (but this would need to be checked).

Then another issue is that moving the applications zone to the other
side of the screen at the moment you've just clicked on it is quite
strange, and will force you to go back to the left with the cursor. If
you do so, this means that the initially-shown area is useless, and then
you'd better add a button (or text area) on the left of the screen that
makes it appear (and thus go directly to the second mockup).

If you want to use the overlay as a task switcher, maybe it would be
good to use hot corners so that you don't need to click on "Activities"
to start it, but only to reach an angle or a specific border of the
screen. That would avoid positiong problems in the layout, since you can
bring the cursor where you want to run the overlay.

I like the idea of the tab-like semi-transparent shapes to switch to
documents or applications, that seems natural and can be very efficient.

Now about recently used applications that you find useless, I must
disagree - first because I wrote this code and I don't want it to be
lost! ;-) More seriously, I think that when we have the support for
different activities, recent apps will really be those that you want to
use. I already have used a little the new application monitoring branch,
and I was honestly surprised by how useful it could be. The old
categories menu is useful when you don't know the apps you want to use,
but when you do it's really not optimal. I'll let you make your opinion
when the code will be merged! And of course mixing ideas is often a good
solution if it's done intelligently...


Let's see what others think - anyway please continue to bring mockups
and ideas