Exposing open windows (taskbar replacement, gestures? and more)

[Naheem Zaffar <naheemzaffar gmail com>]

Hello,

I have been playing around with Gnome-Shell in Fedora 12 development on and off for a few weeks. It is good looking and has some potential - good work guys.

However there are a few issues that are still open and I am not sure what the plans to solve them are, hence this email.

The biggest problem for me is accessing open windows - currently without a taskbar, there are two ways to do this:

1. Click acitivities, let the page zoom out, click the window you wanted.
2. alt+tab and then select the right program followed by the right window.

Both seem inneficient to me, and are slower than having a taskbar. I have however, when playing around with compiz seen something that is almost as good - a mouse gesture where if you sipe the mouse along the top edge of the screen for a long enough distance ending in the corner, all the windows become tiled (just like when you hit activities, but this is without the zooming out of the workspace) and you can select the one you want to use.

What are the developers opinions on this? For laptop users gestures may not be the best depending on the trackpads, but they are very convenient on a desltop system with a good quality mouse. (and/or you could go all the way and copy apple with having special function buttons for this)

Another issue is much smaller and it is about the icons in the top bar - they are not all the visible with the background, so maybe have them be separate from the rest of the icon theme and use high contrast icons there?

and finally, the sidebar. it seems to be awkward, so it at least needs an option to be moved to the right of teh screen and to not displace the icons... also the clock is awkward and pointless since there is the time at the top of teh screen. The sidebar becoming a widget docking station could also be a good idea - maybe even with a widget to show all the open applications that can work as a sort of taskbar replacement?

I am not a developer, nor am I suggesting that any of these concerns have not been discussed, or you may not be aware of them - simpy, I have not seen any discussion so I akm unaware to what the plans are (I hear some presentation recently by John McCann clarified a few things, but it is not available online [yet] so I cannot judge...)