Re: gnome 3.0 shell concept

[Eugene Gorodinsky <e gorodinsky gmail com>]

> Keep in mind those are experimental, AFAIK. I think the overlay mode (as
> we call it) is interesting but should not be the only way of doing
> things. But I guess testing will show what's best.
I am hoping that gnome isn't dead set on those, and still open to
suggestions, that is why I wrote to the list.

> I'm quite interested in the ideas of activities and I've thought a bit
> about them. While the idea of sub-activities (or contexts) is
> interesting, I don't really think we need to implement it in a
> hierachical way. For me, the best is to associate one or more workspaces
> to an activity, and each workspace would then be something like a
> sub-activity. In your example, this would mean code tools are on one
> workspace and Firefox on the other one. I think it solves many issues
> quite simply and is still very intuitive (to hackers at least!).
I only mentioned the idea of hierarchically organized of contexts in
case it was thought that there's only one level of organization. That
is not the case, in my opinion.

> I've never really thought about that, I let this to others... It can be
> quite long to implement, anyway.
It doesn't need to be implemented all in one go. So I wouldn't
concentrate my resources on achieving that goal for 3.0

> See previous mails this week on the list: standard windows switching
> should be available because it's much quicker.
Yeah, I've read those, I agree with it.

> I can see some good ideas here IMHO. Your "meta space" has to do with
> "overlay mode". In the mockup, it's like Exposé, but what you describe
> is more complex. I don't really know what is doable in it, but that
> could be a nice feature and would make complex tasks more intuitive
> maybe.
>
> More generally, I'm wondering whether it could be nice to separate
> overlay from Exposé in the current design. For now, switching windows
> inside the workspaces is quite hard because of the lack of space, and we
> need to hide them anyway if we want to show more actions (see the
> mockups on GNOME's wiki). So why not keep the windows/workspaces issue
> to another mode, triggered by a new button just like on the screenshots
> above? Overlay could then simply go over the current desktop, and could
> be used in a simpler way, since it wouldn't imply a so complex, which
> can be tiring if you use it all the time. What do you think? I'm just
> thinking the current layout will soon be full if we add so many
> functions to it...
I went through the hackfest mockups again, here are some more thoughts:
1. You dont need a search bar in the applications overlay. Switching
between the mouse and a keyboard is ineffective, power users prefer
using shortcuts, while new users just use the mouse. There are in fact
just two ways to operate your computer effectively (the way I see it):
 - one hand on the keyboard, for shortcuts, the other on the mouse for
general point&click
 - both hands on the keyboard, for typing and shortcuts
The less switching a user needs to do in order to operate the
computer, the better. So for example clicking "Activities" and then
typing a program or a document in the search field is ineffective, a
better way would be to provide a shortcut to launch something like
Gnome Do.
2. I don't much like  what the mockups for what the screen looks like
when clicking "more...", I might have some thoughts on how this could
look. Hopefully I'll post some mockups tomorrow.