Re: Active Applications list

[Giovanni Campagna <scampa giovanni gmail com>]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Sean Dunwoody <sean_dunwoody yahoo com> wrote:
> I still haven't seen a valid reason not to integrate a window list of some
> form or other, I know that Gnome 3.0 is meant to be a reinvention of gnome
> but I can understand why people would be angry, every OS I can think of has
> an easy way of changing applications (often involving a window list) that
> can be accessed easily without having to 'zoom out' of what your doing and
> trying to find the application you want . . . which can be rather difficult
> if you have a lot of applications open at once, and also it can be very
> distracting, there have been many a time where this has broken my workflow,
> and whilst I mostly use alt + tab I find it frustrating the way that the
> alt+tab in gnome 3 handles multiple windows of the same application.
>

Speaking personally, I thought the same when I first encountered GNOME
Shell, and actually supposed that the then existing sidebar would be
extended to be a full featured dock. Having used it more, I find the
Activity overview useful as an overview, and got progressively used to
alt-tabbing to change windows. Still, I sometimes need more time to
alt-tab than it used to take with GNOME Panel (as the order of the
application changes every time, so you need to be careful to focus the
right one), but gradually it becomes so automatic I don't even use the
sort-of-dock I posted earlier in this topic.

Nevertheless, I think you are right: the first impact with the total
absence of immediate window management is puzzling, and therefore I
would like to see some sort of default extension, that is a dock /
similar system, that is not part of the core program (and thus can be
easily disabled, upgraded, replaced...) but still is distributed
inside gnome-shell tarball. I can see the distributor doing this, if
upstream is not done (assuming they do ship GNOME Shell, which is not
mentioned either by Ubuntu 10.10 or Fedora 14, both of which plan to
include GNOME 3.0)

> ________________________________
> From: Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>
> To: Nick <soapduk gmail com>
> Cc: gnome-shell-list gnome org
> Sent: Thu, 24 June, 2010 11:53:29
> Subject: Re: Active Applications list
>
> Le jeudi 24 juin 2010 à 22:19 +1200, Nick a écrit :
>> I propose some kind of active apps/tasks list that is displayed at all
>> times. I get the feeling that the developers want to keep the
>> panel/task bar (whatever it is being called) clutter free, so they are
>> not going to want program names splattered across it. I think the
>> solution would be to have smallish icons of the active apps/tasks
>> displayed next to the activities button.
> Hi and thanks for trying the Shell and reporting. This issue has been
> discussed many times already on this list though, and designers and
> developers don't have the time to answer again an again the same
> concerns.
>
> To be short: it's at the core or the Shell's design to work with the
> overview rather than an application list. Though the Shell has a support
> for optional extensions, so if somebody steps in and provides an
> application list extension, this feature will be available for people
> who feel the need for it. But not by default.
>
> Sorry to be quick, but if you want more details, see the list archives
> for the last few months:
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/
> and be sure to read the design documents too:
> http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design
>
>
> Regards
>
>
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>

Giovanni