2009/1/19 Brian Fleeger <brianfleeger yahoo com>: > 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/ ) > I think, especially with Gnome hopefully heading to more Netbooks, keeping the panel slim is a really good thing... Generally minimising horizontal bars with not much content helps a lot. I've spent quite a while customising my panel for my netbook... > 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). > I'm using this global menu now and it is really great (netbooks --> small trackpad --> Fitts law becomes more important...) - it reduce wasted screen space and makes navigation easier. It currently seems to be being designed and organised much more carefully than the project out of which it grew was. I've attached an image of my panel using globalmenu and some monochrome icons... The button in top right corner is a 'close top window' button - not necessarily something I would recommend for all users, but great for the aforementioned fiddly trackpad with small screen. The curvy arrow opens a drawer to hold the icons/applets that are visually distracting and waste space. But as you say - the implementors make the features :)
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Panel_Demo.png
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