Re: Eliminate titlebar for maximized windows

[Jay Bee <jaybee444 gmail com>]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Natan Yellin <aantny gmail com> wrote:
> Hey Igor!
>
> 2009/1/20 Jay Bee <jaybee444 gmail com>
>>
>> Hello everyone!
>> Here is a mockup picture I made for my idea of elimination of the
>> titlebar for the maximized windows.
>> Please check the attachment and excuse my poor Gimp skills.
>>
>> IMHO, titlebar just wastes precious screen real estate so when an user
>> maxemizes a window the whole window border would grow outside the screen
>> and dissappear, while the titlebar would be shrinked in the panel window
>> list (I used ubuntu-mobile window picker here).
>> That window list item would display title, restore and close buttons.
>> Clicking on the title would minimize the window so there is no need for
>> minimize button here.
>>
>> Restoring a window would shrink the window returning its' border and
>> titlebar.
>> I think this would be a nice way to decrease the clutter and wasting of
>> the vertical screen space.
>>
>> Another thing I would like to discuss is the menu bar... almost every
>> window has it and I think most users use it rarely so there is no need
>> for it to be present at all times, maybe we could add a button in the
>> gui somewhere (say, on the window toolbar or something) that would
>> toggle the menu bar for that window.
>
> What's your opinion on the Global Gtk+ Menu. (It's a panel applet
> which forces menubars to appear at the top of the screen like on OS X.)

Hi Natan, nice to see you again!
Honestly, IMO menus are a design failure (nowdays, they were good in
their time), they are unintuitive and confusing for new users, and as
Microsoft survey showed[1] lots of the functions are hidden and thus
unused because of the cluttered menus...
I for one don't want to bother searching the menus for some obscure
function ( I google it ;-) ).
Windows 7 is shifting all apps that come with windows to ribbon and
soon other 3rd party developers will probably follow.
Note that Menus are especially difficult to use with touch screens,
which are becoming popular lately.
Contextual toolbars look like a good idea to me, implementation could
be in some kind of sidebar because widescreen displays are becoming
the norm it seems. I have a few Ideas about that, I will put it in a
mockup later... This is probably up to app developers, not really
gnome-shell thing.
Regarding GTK+ global menus (haven't used OS X), I must say that I am
not very fond of them, they cause my mouse distance to increase
significantly, I will try them again but as I said, I hardly use menus
(I mostly use keyboard shortcuts)

>>
>> Please discuss :-)
>>
>> I am looking for the ways to contribute myself but coming from the
>> windows world of Visual Studio I am a bit intimidated and have no idea
>> where to start.
>
> Do you have any experience with C or Javascript?

I do have experience with both (more C than js), but not with Gnome
(and gtk+) architecture or libraries.
I think http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove is the right place to study
Gnome so I'll check it out.
I'm afraid I'm not advanced enough, but I hope to contribute some patches.

>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Igor
>>
>> P.S. I love the work done so far.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
>
> -Natan

[1] - http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx