Re: Breadcrumbs in the panel

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le vendredi 05 juin 2009 à 03:09 +0200, Sander Dijkhuis a écrit :
> On June 4, Milan wrote in the Window Trays thread:
> > BTW, are there any news about Sander's breadcrumbs? Is it something
> > that's going to be kept?
> 
> I think it isn't likely to become part of the default desktop, but it could be
> made available as a third-party plugin.
Yeah, that could be interesting. Are there plans about easy plugins
installation in the shell? Maybe that's a little early, but it looks
like JS allows it easily: we could say that all .js files located in a
given folder are loaded and initialized, that could allow us to test a
variety of designs.


> After talking with Owen and Jon I agree it isn't obviously an improvement and
> might not fit well into gnome-shell's design. For example, it's very focused
> on the workspace / window hierarchy, while the Activities overview makes this
> concept apprehensible and usable more effectively in a really different way.
> Also, for 'most' users, who won't need more than one workspace, displaying
> 'Workspace 1' doesn't make sense.
Obviously, when there's only one workspace, that part should be hidden,
showing only the title of the active window.


> In fact, the breadcrumbs don't really show any information the user doesn't
> already know about. The space in the top panel could be used more efficiently,
> for example by mentioning attention-requesting windows. Putting the _ [] X
> buttons of maximized windows in there might also still be worth experimenting
> with.
At least, the idea of putting the title of the active window when it's
maximized makes much sense to me. We can very easily gain about 20
pixels, which makes it almost a full-screen mode. I think that will
improve usability, e.g. when reading long text. Do you think we could do
this in the default shell, or are there other elements we want to put in
that space? We really need to fill that with something useful...


> For window switching, Jeremy's latest mockups seem likely to provide a clear
> and better integrated mechanism. It would be interesting to see how that works
> out, in combination with alt-tab for faster switching.
IMHO people won't use the overlay to switch between windows. If we force
them to do so, I expect it to be a major regression compared with the
old layout. Jeremy's mockups make it possible to see what apps are
already running before you start it possibly by mistake, but I don't
think they're designed for window switching. And Alt+Tab is only for
power users. I'm not saying that breadcrumbs would be the ideal solution
to this, though.

Cheers