Re: Activity Bar Panel Provides Little Utility, Takes Up Space, And is Distracting

[Mystilleef <mystilleef gmail com>]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 5:19 AM, Thomas Bouffon <thomas bouffon gmail com> wrote:
> Hi
>>
>> Fair enough. But do we, or users, spend a significant portion of our
>> desktop activity staring at the clock? Isn't the clock in many cases a
>> distraction when we need to get work done?
>
> Actually Much less of a distraction/waste than having my name, a network
> status as I am on a static IP Lan and a volume button as I have no speaker
> plugged in my PC.
> Moreover, needing an action to check the time would change the time spent
> from a blink of an eye to a few seconds.
>
> Actually, I even used to display the time of my next bus in the status area
> (until it was not compatible anymore with the shell and did not spend time
> to fix this).
>
>
> Cheers,
> Thomas
>
>

To be honest, I don't get the clock argument. If you want to
know the time, it's little or no effort to press the
"window" or "super" key. I'd wager it takes less than 250
milliseconds to get the date and time this way. Perhaps a
few milliseconds more than the current method. But that's
hardly perceivable by human cognition.

I think the clock and all the other items are mostly
redundant activities that don't need to be persistently
visible. The top panel belongs in the activities screen
rightfully like all the other shell elements.

At the very least the top panel should have autohide or
intellihide capabilities for users who don't care for
starring at the clock or panel all day. I have no data, but
I'm sure there are many of us.