Re: #4 on ToDo list: make the top panel prettier

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sun, 2009-01-18 at 19:14 -0800, Brian Fleeger wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I want to make a couple of suggestions for how to improve the looks of
> the top panel.  Please see the attached png image.  Biggest
> suggestions are: taller panel (~43 pxls, give or take);smaller (16
> pxl) notification icons with sufficient space between them (avoiding
> crowding); stacked clock and action widgets; possible analogue clock
> widget/eye candy.  (Reference: pillaged ideas from Hylke Bons' blog
> http://www.bomahy.nl/hylke/blog/ugly-notification-area-in-gnome/ )

Well, the person writing the code gets to pick the ideas. :-) Right now,
my "make up some numbers for a background color. Oh, that gives me tan"
is winning.

Changing to a different fixed background color, moving stuff around,
changing size and padding are all very straightforward changes to the
Javascript code.

Matching the theme colors of the GTK+ theme is a little trickier - but
I'd be happy to give a step-by-step on that if there is interest.

> I have one question: with the part of the top panel next to the
> activities button empty, are there any plans to use global menus to
> more effectively use that wide open space?  Is it going to go fallow?
> Although the issue of task management and app launching has yet to be
> resolved, I cannot help but think you would either want to put a task
> manager or app launcher there, or use it for some type of global
> menu.  
> 
> There is already a Global Menu Bar for Gnome which hase reached the
> 0.7 stage of development: http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/
> It is stable and compatible with most of the apps I use now (firefox
> and OO.o being two very big exceptions).  
> 
> Alternatively, it could be made like the Sugar OS's picture-based
> "menu" system running along the top of the screen just under the
> panel.  This would be like a best of both worlds from the Mac OS X and
> Office 2007's Ribbon (See:
> http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12355_22-183268-7.html )  

There is certainly a disaster going on when you have a full screen
maximized browser, and you have:

 Top panel
 Title bar
 Menu
 Toolbar
 Tabs
 Toolbar-like-page header
 *content*

So thoughts about how we simplify the top of the screen are definitely
needed. I have some opinion that the global menu bar is pretty tied to
the application-centric model of the Macintosh .. it's not entirely
clear to me that you can go to the global menu bar without adopting that
model wholesale. Which would be a pretty major change to the way the
desktop works.

- Owen