Re: Gnome objectives

[Gerald Henriksen <ghenriks gmail com>]

On Mon, 22 Nov 2010 09:06:04 +0100, you wrote:

>continuing it. Do you thing the iPhone was successfull because it was
>like all the other smartphones? No, it was because it had a new and
>clever concept.

The iPhone wasn't successful because it had a clever concept, it was
successful because Apple designed it for what it is - a device with a
small screen which needed an interface that worked within that
constraint.

Which brings us to the problem with Gnome Shell - the design decisions
seemed to be based on the idea that you are running it on a small
screen where having a taskbar takes up needed screen space.

This is why some people are objecting to Gnome Shell, because in the
belief that the taskbar is wasting space needed for applications it
has been removed, making mouse navigation harder.

Moving between programs using a mouse is easy with a taskbar - you
move down to the icon/name of the program you want and select it and
go.  But with Gnome Shell you first have to go to the upper left to
get the list of open applications to appear, and then you can select
what you want.  This involves an extra step that intrudes into the
workflow by needlessly causing extra mouse movement as well as visual
distraction with the shrinking/expanding of the entire desktop
unnecessarily.

I really want to like Gnome Shell, I think some of the ideas it
provides are very exciting and have tried it several times since it
was first packaged in Fedora.  Perhaps if I was a user who primarily
navigated around my desktop using the keyboard or who used different
workspaces I would have been happy and stayed with it.  But I am not,
I use the mouse and don't use workspaces, and the result is that Gnome
Shell feels very awkward and I quickly abandon it.