Re: Task list in Gnome Shell - mockup

[Brian Fleeger <brianfleeger yahoo com>]

From: Igor Vatavuk <jaybee444 gmail com>

On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 7:24 PM, Sander Dijkhuis <sander dijkhuis gmail com> wrote: 

>>Opening the menu on mouse hover might be irritating when you want to
>>reach something near the panel (like a window's title bar) and
>>accidentally move the cursor to the window list button. I think a
>>widget like the drop-down box in GTK+ would work well.

>I was aiming at 1 click switch so that's why I choose hover
>instead of click, however, I can see how this could cause problems.

What about a click + hold action?  With the mouse depressed, the user could scan through the items and release the button to select.  click+hold and release would go very well with a touch-screen setup too.

I have been thinking a lot about these two ideas (breadcrumb + dropdown list), and worked up a couple of pictures.  In this modification to Breadcrumbs, click + hold would activate the list (a normal single click would open and close it quickly, so the behavior should be easily discoverable).  As the depressed mouse scans through the list, each time it hovers over a different title, a Mutter special effect similar to the Compiz Alt + Tab effect would bring that window in front of all the others, and darken the rest of the screen, similar to Win7's Aero-peek feature.
See: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3550/3495515137_47b1d16603_o.png

In a second picture I try to work out way of scanning through workspaces more conveniently than a list layout.  A big problem is that the list is linear, but the workspaces are on a grid.  Even if workspaces had visible auto-generated numerical names, due to the unique pattern in which spaces are added, it would look really funky (not at all like a normal grid).  One solution would be to have a kind of actual drop-down grid (it may or may not show thumbnails of the workspaces) that comes down when you click the workspaces button.  As with the idea above, as you mouse over each square in the grid, the screen itself could react by cycling through the worspaces, like Ctrl+Alt+arrows does now.
See: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3342/3495515159_c494f133fb_o.png

The biggest problem I see with this layout is that a drop-down grid is not consistent with the regular list used for windows.  But for now it is the only way I can think of to avoid the awkwardness of a textual list for workspaces.

Regards,
Brian