DockBar-style minimization (with crude mock-ups)

[Ryan Peters <sloshy45 sbcglobal net>]

Hello everyone,

In the while I have been testing GNOME Shell, there have been two major 
problems that me and other people have noticed.

Problem 1: How do we handle minimized windows?
Problem 2: How do we handle the notification area/system tray?

Problem 2 has been officially decided upon, and the notification area 
will be "system only", meaning that it will only provide indicators for 
system-related things such as internet connectivity, bluetooth, volume, 
etc. This makes the section much more organized than before, where it 
was a mostly-random pile of icons for unrelated programs. This brings up 
one more problem, however.

Problem 3: What if I liked the old functionality?

The old functionality had several uses that could be considered useful. 
For example, lets say Rhythmbox doesn't fit into any of my workspaces 
and I don't want to shove it away to its own workspace. I could minimize 
it to my system tray, and if I needed to skip a song or turn 
notifications on/off, I could right-click it and a menu would pop up. Or 
if I wanted to run a Bit-torrent client in the background without having 
a window up; I could minimize that to the tray as well. This 
functionality is missing in the new, yet more organized system tray.

I made some very crude mock-ups to illustrate some of my own ideas about 
how this could be fixed. This is the first time I have ever used 
Inkscape for actual work, so don't expect them to be 
professional-looking. My first mock-up is as follows:

http://imgur.com/BoLcm.png

This mock-up shows how minimized applications could be handled. It's 
similar in a way to a popular program, DockBar or DockBarX. When 
mousing-over the program icon, it could show a menu similar to this. 
First the title of the program, then the windows of that program that 
are minimized. If a minimized window wants attention, the text referring 
to it could change color and/or italicize. Hovering over a window on the 
list could have an "X" in a circle on the right side which, when 
clicked, could close the window.

This still leaves the problem of having programs run in the background 
and being easily accessible. When working with programs, I noticed that 
programs with a tray icon usually had it visible all the time, 
regardless whether or not you had one of the program windows open. This 
mock-up shows another way to do it while still remaining organized:

http://imgur.com/vJ1dP.png

When you right-click a group of minimized windows, a custom menu similar 
to how the old system tray icons worked could pop-up. This menu's 
contents are dependent on the application, and it returns the old and 
useful functionality in an organized, more-useful way. It reduces the 
redundancy of having options you can access with the window you 
currently have open by limiting you to using them when the program's 
running in the background.

I'm sorry that my mock-ups are rather mediocre, but I hope you 
understand and/or like my ideas! If someone wants to talk about this 
post or any of those images somewhere else, you have the permission to 
do so under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license (just in case). For 
attribution, the minimum required is "some person from the GNOME Shell 
mailing list".

    - Ryan Peters, GNOME Shell tester.