Re: Re: my gnome-shell proposal

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 7:10 PM, <kaddy080 gmail com> wrote:

Hi, thanx for your comments on my design. Although I disagree with some of your comments, but thats what this is all about eh... a discussion....
Read my following replies. cheers.

Indeed :)

 

On , Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me> wrote:
> Hi there,
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> First off, thanks for taking so much interest in doing this.  A couple of comments on your proposal.
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> On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 5:58 PM, kaddy080 gmail com> wrote:
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> I have some designs drawn up... forgive me if it is not professional looking... but my ideas are good... I will give the links to the designs and a link
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> to my youtube video explaining the implementation....
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> They look fine to me.
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> here is the video on my channel....
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> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9OP5I5lkfk
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> And here are the rough designs I drawn up on paper that I used in that video....
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> Panel http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/GnomeShell?action="">
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> So the problem here is that having a menu near a hotspot is that invariably, the user will end up hitting the hot spot instead of trying to get to the recent menu or journal menu.  So you really can't have it close to the Activities menu.  Otherwise, you'll trigger the overview mode and if that happens enough times it will create a lot of frustration. So you'll have to keep that blank.
>

It believe it would be pretty hard to miss the places and jounal menu and accidently hit the hotspot.... But.... a Solution to this could be that the Places and Journal tabs only show up in overlay mode.... therefore you have to hit the hotspot to then click on those tabs... Just an idea....

It would be hard to know until you actually implemented it and tested it.  The reason I say that is when I used the equivalent compiz feature, I hit that damn hot spot all the time and it annoys the living hell out of me and I'm just hitting the "Applications" menu.  So you could test out the usability by hitting enabling compiz feature and see if you get the same thing.

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> As for showing the application, I agree that having the app disappear is kinda wierd.  I'm not sure how that is dealt with.  I need to go back and refresh my memory on the design again.  In the panel there is something that says what is running, can you not click on that?
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> Yes... I really don't like the app disappearing into activities.. and I have read many comments from users in forums who also do not like it.... it is too much hassle to zoom out or alt/tab to get the application back... and no, you can not currently click on the panel to get it back.... something needs to be implemented for this... thats why I proposed my panel dock.... 

I resolved it by using gnome-do which makes for a perfect compliment to gnome-shell.

 

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> Activities http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/GnomeShell?action="">
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> Places http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/GnomeShell?action="">
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> See my thoughts above on the places.  If you have places already you probably don't want anything in overview mode which I think you referred to some kind of thing there.  You're idea of having a menu in the overview mode will not likely be accepted.  We had a discussion regarding this some months back, they don't really want to categorize the applications.  The current setup works well enough, but the proof is in the user testing.  I don't feel like debating esoteric design decisions without data that says it sucks or not.  It might not.  I'm not a typical user so it's hard for me to judge.  The list of common apps tend to remain in the "5 most recent apps". 
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>  It will be a shame if there is no category structure for the menu.... This means that when somebody is looking for an application... but don't know the name of it.. but they know what the program does... They will have to search through a pile of icons all mixed up with eachother.... that would be a major inconvenience for alot of users including myself... It needs to be organised.

Well, any weaknesses regarding categories will come out in user testing.  So, if there is a general unhappiness with it then we will need to confront the issue.  I"m respecting the idea that they want to try something completely different, and what I've found is that in general our ideas in its totality end up coming back to either the old design or it looks like the design of a popular operating system.  So I'm content to play with it and file bugs against stuff that should work like zooming into workspaces which right now hasn't work and hasn't worked in several weeks.  I can't imagine it's not already out there as a bug.

My own experience is that MOST of the time I don't have a problem finding the app I'm looking for because it ends up being in my list of pinned applications.  In general, most people use about 3-4 apps tops all the time.  The times we don't use those, I found that even if they are categorized I tend to still spend a 30-40 seconds looking for the exact application.  What might be neat is to have a faded color list of icons in the main list that are say black and white, and over time they slowly colorized in order to spot your secondary or third list of applications that you use.  That would help in avoiding searching for things as much as possible.  You'll never be able to get rid of the problem.

 sri