Re: Gnome Shell

[Calum Benson <calum benson oracle com>]

On 31 Jan 2011, at 17:24, Allan Day wrote:
> 
>> 5. In general it just seems like that there is a lot more mouse moving 
>> and clicking than prior.
> 
> I'm surprised to hear you say that, since the shell can be used almost
> solely from the keyboard.

Being able to use the keyboard isn't a substitute for ensuring mouse usage is efficient as possible. People who prefer to use the mouse will continue to do so in GNOME 3, and IMHO have reasonable grounds for complaint if they have to do more work the mouse than they used to perform common tasks.

Has anyone done a GOMS analysis[1] (or similar) on the key navigation tasks in GNOME 2 v GNOME 3?

> I also don't really find activating the
> overview with the mouse to be a chore, since you can simply flick the
> pointer into the top-right corner.

"Flicking the pointer" is easy enough to do with a real mouse, but isn't a gesture that works very well with touchpads, which I'd guess a lot of our users will be using most of the time. When I try to flick the pointer with my touchpad, it just stops halfway :) From a brief experiment, if my pointer's in the middle of the screen, it takes me two (on my laptopt screen), sometimes three (on my external monitor) separate finger movements to hit the corner...

Cheeri,
Calum.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOMS

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer     Oracle Corporation Ireland Ltd.
mailto:calum benson oracle com         Solaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Oracle Corp.