Re: Gnome-shell - some usability problems I found

[Giovanni Campagna <scampa giovanni gmail com>]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 3:56 PM, Dylan McCall <dylanmccall gmail com> wrote:
> On 7/8/10, Mark Curtis <merkinman hotmail com> wrote:
>>
>> I don't under... why the name of the appli... is listed at all.  Pretty much
>> every appli... name gets trunc... in the overv.... If the curre... setup
>> can't fit the name of the major... of the progr... even on a defau.... GNOME
>> install, then maybe somet... is wrong with the design
>>
>
> That sums it up for me. What bothers me here is that the overlay has
> the entire screen - at least 1200 pixels wide - but all these little
> widgets are trying their hardest to be as small as possible. Here the
> application browser - The Reason why people click the Activities
> button - squeezes into less space than an iPhone's home screen. The
> remaining seven eights of the screen do nothing.

Except that the main focus of the Activities button is not application
/ places / documents, is the workspace overview, which in fact takes
up as much space as possible. This said, I agree with you that most
applications have their names truncated and can be recognized only
because you remember them and their icons: would it be enough to add a
tooltip showing the full application name (Name + GenericName)?

> The design may be more interesting if there aren't a hundred apps to
> switch between (one reason why iPhone's works), but that needs some
> well defined philosophy changes first.

What do you propose? The menu, again? Or the list like recent docs
(which works for even less apps)?

Giovanni