Re: Minimized windows and application menu

[Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org>]

Hi!

On Fri, 2010-12-03 at 21:00 +1100, Bojan Smojver wrote:
> Just wanted to follow up on a story of minimized windows in gnome-shell
> (tried 2.31.5-7.fc14 from Fedora).

Quick side note: those packages are very outdated (not due to laziness,
but because it would require to replace stable system components with
unstable versions). Building from source is *highly* recommended, and
not too hard if you follow the instructions on
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell#Building.

> Is there going to be a place on the
> screen (not on the preview screen) where minimized windows go? As a
> user, I was completely confused with the minimized windows disappearing
> from the screen altogether, without any obvious way to get them back.

You probably won't like the designers' answer to that one - the current
plan is to remove all buttons but the close button from the title bar by
default. Windows can now be maximized by dragging the window to the top
monitor edge, but the minimize action does not have a replacement (yet?
The keyboard shortcut will still be supported though).

Maybe there will be another answer to "get that out of my way now, but
let me get back to it later" at some point ...


> Also, I read in the cheat sheet that:
> 
> "The panel has the Activities button for switching to the overview, the
> name of the focused application (which will provide the application menu
> in the future), the current date, the notification icons, and the button
> with the user name that activates the user menu."
> 
> Are you guys seriously considering moving application menu up the top,
> Mac style? I certainly hope not. This would be such a backward step.
> Please tell me it isn't so... :-(

Not so :-)

The application menu is a single popup menu and should contain only
actions affecting the application as a whole - for instance preferences
and help are good candidates, copy and paste are not. The menu can also
provide jumplist-like behavior, e.g. Firefox could push a list of open
tabs into the menu.

At least in the 3.0 time frame, windows' menu bars are not affected. At
a later point, actions available from the application menu may be
removed from the window's menu bar to avoid duplication - some
applications which don't have window specific menus could drop their
menu bar at that point, but there is no intention to move
window-specific menu items outside the window they belong to. Standard
actions like save, print or the entire edit menus should(*) never be
moved out of a "classic" menu bar inside the window.


Hope I could clear things up a little (and that you don't dislike the
answers completely ...)

Florian


(*) "should" because ultimately it's up to application authors to push
actions to the application menu - the design is very clear on this
though: those options MUST NOT be moved to the app menu.