Re: Re : interapplication communication

[Mike Bursell <mike hingston demon co uk>]

(Hopefully this doesn't count as a top-post, as I'm putting general
information at the top, and responding to a particular section below!)

I've been using gnome-shell for quite a while now, and have been worried
that things were getting stuck in a rut.  I'm very pleased to see the
recent flurry of discussions on these topics.  I won't rehash all of the
issues, just add my 2c that from point of view, the only really annoying
things about gnome-shell atm are:

1) having to do multiple steps to get to, say, banshee or oowriter,
including a context switch (from standard view to Activity Overview).
It sounds like people are trying to address this.
2) not being able to find things I do often quickly (it's a pain having
to type "empa" or "firef" or "poker" (!), or navigate down long menus to
find them.  Sounds like people are trying to address this, too.

So, onto my other point...

<SNIP>
> > "The message tray is meant to be self-introducing, because it pops up by
> > itself when something comes in. So hopefully, going back to the bottom
> > of the screen will be natural to users; they'll pick up the idea that
> > "messages are at the bottom""
> >
> > Ubuntu nailed it with having messages in the top right, along with the whole
> > user activity/switcher part. Instead of working on a whole new part on the
> > bottom of the screen teams should be working together.
> 
> There is a section on this in the design document.  I won't reiterate
> it here.  The summary is that while I think Ubuntu's notify-osd does
> solve some important problems with the way notifications are performed
> in GNOME 2 many others remain.  It has a very different goal.  It is
> intentionally non-interactive.  Our message design is intentionally
> interactive.

Just a thought about placement.  I speak as a Ubuntu user (though I've
been debian, slack, RedHat, SuSE and a couple of others over the past 12
+ years), so I realise that I'm biased, but is there some merit in this
argument:

If top right isn't a _bad_ choice, for a message bar/section/thingy,
then why not keep it there, for the simple reason that there are lots of
people for whom it will be very natural - all those who use Ubuntu.
This won't alienate anyone else (unless I'm missing other distros who
use messaging and I don't know about - oh, and M$ users, which is an
interesting discussion in itself), but would be very good for lots of
others.  Any thoughts?

-Mike.