Re: some thoughts on gnome shell

[Ryan Peters <sloshy45 sbcglobal net>]

On 08/02/2010 09:03 AM, Sean Dunwoody wrote:

Thanks,

I really should have checked the design documents before but I can't seem to access them now, it seems that the gnome project website is down :-/

Also your design breakdown was really good, I agree with you that the new Shell has advantages to Unity, but it still looks like the Gnome team took A LOT of influence from the canonical team. The message tray is awesome and original though, much better than NotifyOSD :-)

-Sean

---

I agree they took a lot of influence, but just in the same kind of way that OpenOffice.org would take influence from MS Office, or Firefox taking influence from Chrome or Opera. In a world of ideas that you can't lock down, it's relatively easy and effective to take an idea that somebody else already thought of, think about it, and apply it (especially if the idea is a good one). Once again, while Shell does look similar to Unity, they function very, very differently with different purposes in mind. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, Unity is polishing it, while Shell is putting snow-spikes on it ;).

I've put up a temporary mirror of the design document on my Dropbox account for you. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/807039/GNOME_Shell-20091114.pdf

    Enjoy!
    - Ryan Peters