Workspace Switcher and Dock

["J. Adam Craig" <jadamcraig gmail com>]

Hello, and thanks for the excellent work on GNOME 3.  I've been testing the interface as it has developed since late 2010, and I'm very pleased with the stellar and efficient performance of the new desktop environment, now that it has been officially released.

I do have two very small suggestions that I believe would make the user experience more seamless and simple:

1) THE WORKSPACE SWITCHER

When Ctrl + Alt + Up/Down are pressed, the workspaces switch, and a grey-ish box appears in the center of the screen, indicating that the switch is taking place.  The contrast / largesse of the box is somewhat distracting personally, especially when I'm hopping back and forth between a web browser / pdf on one workspace and a document on the next, where I might be writing a paper or article.

Why not place a minimal view of the workspace switcher on the right-side of the desktop, and keep it there at all times?  When I say "minimal view", I mean the workspace switcher as it initially appears on the "Activities" view until it is hovered over with the mouse.  With a minimal view available at all times, quick workspace switching / window dragging would be available at all times without first having to activate the "Activities" view, which consumes excess time.

Not only would this make things more efficient for moving windows between workspaces (by reducing key presses or mouse moves / clicks), but the minimal view of the switcher could quickly expand out and collapse back in when using Ctrl + Alt + Up/Down to change workspaces.  This would give everything a sense of consistency, and because a minimal view of the switcher would already be visible on the right side of the screen, it would be less distracting to the user, because it would not introduce a new element on the screen (a pop-up, as it were).

2) THE DASH

Place a minimal view of the dash on the left side of the screen, just as I've proposed with the workspace switcher in #1 above.  This could either be a minimal view, or it could be auto-hidden on the left side of the screen.  This way, a user would need only mouse-over the left side of the screen to get at the dash (and hence, favorite applications), reducing key-presses & mouse moves, and thus saving time and making things more efficient.

Really, though, that's all I have.  This works great overall.  Things can always be more efficient.  Having to pull up "Activities" every time I want to open a favorite application or add or change the windows on a workspace is really the only major frustration I've had, and I think the two rather simple ideas I've suggested above would make that process a bit easier.

You may already have given attention to these concerns.  If the features are already available, and I've managed to overlook them, please advise me to how I might activate them.

Thanks so much for your attention to these things,

- Adam