Re: Workspace Switcher and Dock

[Onyeibo Oku <twohotis gmail com>]

On Thu, 2011-04-07 at 05:16 -0400, J. Adam Craig wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

I 'personally' don't think this is a good idea.  When working with
Bricscad or Inkscape, you'll need that area to access tool bars.
Putting the switcher permanently there will create a conflict.  I'd
rather they made the indicator more subtle like 30%-50% gray rather than
70%-90% Gray.  This styling may already be adjustable via Gnome-shell
CSS sheets  (I hope this is possible)

> 
> 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).
> 

Try CTRL+TAB too.

> 
> 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.

The same conflict will happen here again.  Toolbars usually occupy that
space too in many applications.  The Dash will be struggling for
attention and make life difficult for those who want to access nearby
tool buttons.

Regards
Onyeibo