gnome 3.0 shell concept

[Eugene Gorodinsky <e gorodinsky gmail com>]

Hi all. I've seen the gnome 3.0 concept shell with which people came up at gui hackfest. In my opinion it breaks away too much from the existing interaction model, and in some ways it makes it harder to work with the desktop than it is now. For example the second screenshot apparently makes the desktop zoom out at the press of the Activities button, this is something that in my opinion would confuse the user. The mockups for navigating the applications menu are worse even, since the menu replaces the whole screen apparently. I beleive such a menu would make gnome unusable for me. On the other side there were a few very interesting ideas in the document, which I would like to discuss.
I've never before used virtual desktops, but after reading the document, I agree that they are a grat way of separating activities, or "contexts". Actually, the whole idea we group our activities by contexts has been quite enlightening for me, however I bselieve these contexts are sort of hierarchical, and not flat. This is actually the reason for inventing tabbed browsing and a bunch of other things. For example let's take an activity "programming an app": the programmer writes some code, but at some point is stuck and wants to search for information to help him with his task. The programmer then opens his web browser and starts to look for the solutions: he goes to his chosen search engine and enters some keywords, after that he gets the results which he must look through one by one. Now to do that he needs to open a window for each of them, especially if we consider that his solution can only be pieced together from several sources. What happens in this scenario is that writing/debugging code and using the web browser are part of one activity or context, but looking through the information using the web browser is part of a subcontext. This subcontext requires more than one window just like the programming context. So in reality, what I think happens is that while working on some task we constantly zoom in to take a closer look at some aspects of the task and zoom out to look over the whole thing and then zooming in to some other aspect of the task. In fact, I think that zooming in is quite a natural way of describing it all. I'm not sure if you realised this already or not, so I'm just mentioning it in case you haven't. It was mentioned in the article that tabs are a failure of the window manager. Indeed the window manager should do these things, though at the moment I'm not sure how the window manager could manage windows in a different way so that tabs were not required, but I beleive some sort of releif could be provided by creating a tabbed window manager (maybe something like google's browser).
Another idea I liked is the expose-like switching between windows. I really think it's a fine idea, however the user shouldn't have to solely rely upon it, the taskbar is a faster way of switching between windows and if the user is using the mouse to switch, they will appreciate that. 

I've been thinking of improving the management of workspaces as well. However instead of explaining I'll show the mockups I came up with, first.
They are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/e.gorodinsky/Gnome#

The first mockup is showing the normal user desktop, nothing radical there and as is evident I'm not even trying to make the system easier to use for people who've only seen computers on TV but never even touched them. The reason is that you'll have to train these people to use the mouse, explain to them the basic concepts of interacting with a computer (what's a focus, why you need to click on the edit widget to type anything into it, or that you can click on some text and get a menu with more text etc.), so I don't think this will add up much, better to have a book or a video guide on how to use a computer rather than trying to make a computer so easy to use that the user wouldn't need to read a manual to use it. 

The second mockup is where clicking on that arrow in the first mockup will take you. I actually think a better place for this button would be the top right corner, but I'm not sure how to let the user know that the arrow has an entirely different function from anything else on the bar. The arrow takes you what I called a "meta space". The idea here is that by clicking and dragging the windows, a user could group them together and move them around as if they were pieces of paper on a table. The DE could then identify which windows belong to which workspace (i.e. virtual desktop) and add them to the task bar for that workspace. The workspaces could be created and deleted dynamically and also from this "meta space" the user can have the ability to click on any window and automatically switch to that workspace as well as bring the window they clicked on to the top.

So these are my two cents, I'd like to know what you think about them.