Conceptual ideas for Gnome Shell

[Reiner Jung <reiner jung uni-oldenburg de>]

Hi,

I had recently the time to test the new gnome-shell on my karmic koala. 
First I have to say, it looks nice and has some nice features. And I 
know it is not feature complete right now. But still I have two ideas 
how the experience could be improved.

1. While in the old panel style desktop, users have to click on 
"Applications", a "Category" and then the application to start an 
application, this changes in the gnome-shell to one additional click on 
"Activity". So you need to perform 4 instead of 3 clicks. This is 
unfortunate, but not a real big issue, because people do not start so 
many applications.

However, I found one irritating thing in the process. Right now 
gnome-shell displays (when "Activity" is clicked) a side bar, with some 
shortcuts for applications below the title applications. And a small 
browse button right of that title.

When a user activates this side bar, she/he automatically clicks on the 
word application, but nothing happens, because you have to click 
"browse". I would encourage you to make the whole title of this section 
click-able, so when someone clicks on the title the application menu opens.

2. In Gnome 2.26 the desktop is provides several workspaces which is a 
good concept. It is used by many people in the following way.
The first workspace is used for communication applications like mail, 
chat, micro-blogging. The second is used for surfing. And the last for 
multimedia applications (e.g. music). In between the workspaces are used 
for the daily work.

The old workspace model does not really support this way to work. 
However, gnome-shell is designed with the idea to support activity based 
workspace usage. To improve this, gnome-shell should not be too 
concentrated on applications, but on activities.

First it should be able to show different shortcuts below the 
"Application" title in the side bar. So applications for communication 
are shown when the first workspace is selected. This feature would 
require some good defaults, but it should also allow easy 
reconfiguration (especially for the work related workspaces), because 
this is highly user dependent.

Also certain application are used in different contexts. For example: on 
one screen the browser is used as a surf tool, while on another 
workspace it is used as head for a web-based desktop application.

And finally when you work on certain tasks you use several different 
applications. Example: you work on a web-application project, then you 
use let say Netbeans on one workspace and on another you have firefox 
running to show the pages produced by the web-application. It would be 
great if for such tasks workspace groups could be created, which 
automatically start the associated applications.

If anybody is interested I could draw some "screenshots" to illustrate 
the ideas.

Greetz
  Reiner