On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Ross Smith
<myxiplx googlemail com> wrote:
There's no denying that these look fantastic, and there are some
really nice ideas in here. However, I'm going to part from the crowd
here and say that I actually prefer the current gnome-shell menu to
the one shown.
- This layout looks too busy to me, I like the simplicity of the original
- While having just 7 programs shown may sound limiting, I'm finding
that 99% of the time it just works (and I run a *lot* of software)
- the limited number of items also encourages people to use search.
- I also like the way the original gives equal weight to programs and
documents, encouraging the use of the activities menu to directly open
documents.
With that said though, there are a few things though that are really,
really well done:
- I love the little information button, could I suggest a push-pin to
pin people's favourite items too?
- Love the categories & sorting
- The recent document view is just superb, with everything in
chronological order
Now previously I've suggested making the search pluggable so you can
searching things like firefox bookmarks.
Having seen this, I'm thinking I wasn't going far enough. Firefox
bookmarks are a great example of something that works as a pluggable
'program' - something you launch. Firefox history would be a great
pluggable 'document', and I'd really like to have the option to
include those in that recent document list.
And looking at the recent document view, it appears you've covered how
this would look to the user. I can think of a couple more things that
would be useful though, and that are not listed here. With a
pluggable framework, could you just display all registered categories?
The full list of things I can think of that would be useful are:
- documents (with sub-filters for types of document - images,
documents, music, etc)
- Browsing history
- Emails
- chat logs
That's exactly the goal of GNOME Zeitgeist- in fact, we already index all of the items that you mentioned and display them in chronological order.
Siegfried Gevatter (RaintCT) will be working on adding a Zeitgeist-based interface to GNOME Shell during the upcoming GSoC. If you have any ideas for Zeitgeist, feel free to email us at
gnome-zeitgeist-users lists launchpad net