Re: Some small ideas for the Shell Panel and Overview

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico gnome org>]

On Tue, 2011-04-12 at 10:08 +0200, Elia Cogodi wrote:

Very interesting mail, Elia.  You have some very good points.

> - Instead of the application grid being triggered by a tab-like
> button, it could be a special dash item. Always last, named something
> like "all applications" or "more applications", opening the same
> interface we have now.

This is actually how the initial versions of gnome-shell worked.  You
can see an old screenshot here -
http://www.vuntz.net/photoblog/20081021_desktop-shell-overlay.png

This got me thinking.

It's *definitely* more comfortable to pick frequently-used apps from a
short list like the dash, than from a long list like the Applications
tab.

However, I find myself doing this a lot:

1. I need an app that is not in the Dash by default.

2. I bring up Applications.

3. I spend a few uncomfortable seconds looking for the app in question -
found it - clicked it and it got launched.

And then I'm not diligent enough to *first* add the app to the Dash;
it's running already, so I get on with my life.

This is also what happened with Novell's gnome-main-menu [1] - while in
theory it lets you drag apps from the "more applications" to a "fast"
place, I have to be arsed to actually do that.

What if the Applications tab showed you a little "pin" icon when you
hover an app's icon, so that you could immediately add it to the Dash by
pinning it?

Or what if the current application's icon (the one next to the
Activities button) actually had such a "pin me" sub-icon, or a
context-menu item in addition to "Quit $app" to let you add the app to
the Dash?

> - "smarter than thou" UI: the first time a user launches an
> application from the application tab or by search, suggest that they
> can add it to the dash (a dialog with a nice "add it to the dash"
> button).

Or an unobtrusive version - have a Pin icon in the Dash when the app is
running, so you can dashify it right there.

> - "smarter than thou" UI 2: track the number of times a user launches
> an application (I suppose Zeitgeist could do it easily, right?) and
> after -say- 5 times, if the application is not in the dash already
> show the suggestion dialog.
> - "smarter than thou" UI 3: if the user has pinned to the dash less
> than -say- 15 applications, show the most used applications up to the
> 15 total number in an "automatic" section of the dash (Zeitgeist
> again?)

This is a very good idea.  Zeitgeist can certainly do it; I'll add it to
the to-do list at http://live.gnome.org/DocumentCentricGnome  (I hope
Akshay Gupta's project for the Summer of Code gets accepted; I would be
mentoring him, and that wiki page is more or less a to-do list for his
project) :)

  Federico