Re: Activity Space Mockup

[Marina Zhurakhinskaya <marinaz redhat com>]

Hi Brian!

Thank you for a set of ideas and detailed drawings!

Here are some of the comments I had about your ideas:

1) We probably will end up having a right click menu for the activities to let the user name an activity and perform other actions. It probably should be just one level deep though, because all of the options there would be activity preferences. Since the right-click might not be discoverable enough, we can have icons in the top right corner of each activity for certain actions, just as you propose having icons for the windows in the Frame view.

2) I like an idea of having a second Frame view in which you can perform actions with a windows on the current workspace and which replaces the task list. While representing windows as tiles in it looks appealing, I think we should represent them in the same way as we represent them in the overlay mode, which is currently expose style. We can try it out with both styles though. 

3) We should minimize the number of ways the user can perform a certain action. It seems to me that having Files/Tools and Applications/Contacts panels in the Frame mode duplicates what can be done in the Overlay mode and introduces another way of browsing through the same types of items. Making activity-relevant applications/files/folders is something we should consider though when we work on implementing activities.

4) If the task list is not visible, we'll need to address the issue of how an application would display urgency. For example, what happens when you have a direct message in XChat or a message on Facebook. We can possibly have an icon representing the task list in the panel or have that be handled by the notifications center.

5) I have been thinking about how we can enable tiling of the windows myself, and I think making that one of the features of the Frame mode is very elegant and makes that feature discoverable by the user. I think we can have an icon designating the window as part of the tiled set, but I think we can just have the user press-in that icon on a few windows and then they will be automatically tiled in the main view. The user would then be able to change tiling orientation by moving one of the windows, and the placing of others would adjust automatically. While it will allow creating tiling sets of multiple windows and would not involve potentially confusing manipulations and rearrangements of windows in the Frame mode, it will not allow creation of multiple tiling sets. So we need to figure out if being able to do so is a useful feature. We should also remember the last tiling preference the user had for a particular set of application windows so that they are tiled that way automatically next time they are a part of a tiling set. My initial idea for how we can enable the tiling was allowing the user to select multiple opened windows while holding Ctrl and then select a "Tile selected windows" option from a right click menu on the desktop.

Thanks again! We'll refer back to your ideas in the future design sessions and when implementing stuff.

Marina

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Fleeger" <brianfleeger yahoo com>
To: "Gnome List" <gnome-shell-list gnome org>
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 8:01:41 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Activity Space Mockup

Hi all, 

I have put together a mockup of some ideas about activity spaces -- please have a look at the attached PDF document. 


My idea is have two overlay modes: the current one for general/complex use, and another "Frame" for displaying the task-list and launching frequently used objects. Users could use the first to search out applications and files that are infrequently used, or to reorganize Activity Spaces, while they would use the second to activate the task-list and to open apps and documents within a given activity. I tried to avoid redundancy with the main overlay where possible. I think of the main "Activity" overlay as like a big store-room that holds everything, where the "Frame" would be like the tool box you take with you to do a specific activity -- that is, you only take the objects you need for the job. 


In the attachment I detail three user interfaces: 
1) a task/window list method based on thumbnails; 
2) a "Frame" palett for user-customizable activity spaces, and; 
3) an intuitive (IMO) graphical way to tile windows based on thumbnails. 

At the end, I give an alternative task-list based on an expose-like view, but I know from this list that there are complications with that. It is usually not a good idea to talk about too many variables in one proposal, but all three kind of blend into one another, so please pardon me if it seems like brain dump. 


The idea of using frames came from playing with the OLPC Sugar OS, as well as this early ToPaZ design: ( http://live.gnome.org/BrianMuhumuza/ToPaZ/DeskTop ). The idea of using thumbnails to list windows comes from the Palm Pre/Web OS method of switching apps using a "card" metaphor (effectively thumbnails lined up in a row). The only thing which (I believe) I thought of completely on my own was how to tile windows using thumbnails. 


Regards, 
Brian 



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