Allow Shell Add-ons or integrate more services.

[Brent Foor <brentfoor gmail com>]

Hi My name is Brent I'm new to this mailing list but I'm a big fan of gnome-shell and I have been using it for the last few months.

What I'm suggesting is radical but after using gnome-shell I know what I would do to make it work better for me. A lot of this is related to the other desktops I have used and a few applications i have made designed.

I would totally lose the top panel, I would have no button for activities instead I would use something similar to the breadcrumb mock-ups I have seen to keep the battery icon, username, and all the other icons in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

To pull up the menu overlay area I would have a customisable key to hit. Make it the "windows" key by default. This would bring up the applications menu on the left side of the screen with almost no changes to the way it works now but I would have contacts on the right side of the screen. This would integrate some of the desktop making the overlay less like a glorified menu. 

The right side of the menu overlay would be an integration of empathy. The number one thing I use my computer for is communicating with my friends and family. Right now if I want to send a photo to my mother I have to go to an email client or open up a browser, log in, find the image, upload it, and finally send it. This is a dumb way to do anything, its beyond unintuitive. Integrating empathy, "or pidgin" would allow me to grab a file drag it to the right side of the screen hold it there for a second. "or hit the windows key" and drag it on to my moms icon to send it.

I hope that what im saying makes since if you disagree that this would add a lot of fuctionality or if it doesnt seem possible please let me know. If anyone likes this idea i could create a moke up.

Thanks for reading all of that,
Brent