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

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

2009/1/19 Who <mailforwho googlemail com>:
> 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...

It's something to think about, but I see gnome-shell's target as being
desktop/laptop computing primarily, essentially the same as the stock
GNOME.  Netbooks are of course very important, but they very quite a
bit in hardware capability (screen size, keyboard usability etc.), and
have quite different usage patterns from desktop/laptops.  The role of
gnome-shell for them is probably going to be closer to "technology
source (and driver)" than "reference UI".  What I mean by "driver"
here is that we are building on and thus improving some of the same
technologies that make sense in embedded/mobile/netbook contexts like
Clutter.

I think it would be great of course if GNOME had an explicit netbook
reference target, rather than the various projects scattered about the
intertubes.