Re: A few comments regarding Gnome-shell

[Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org>]

On Mon, 2011-03-07 at 22:02 +0100, David Prieto wrote:
> I'm glad to know that it's due to technical reasons more than being by
> design.

That is debatable - the current design calls for "global application"
actions to be moved to the application menu (the panel item with
application icon + name, which currently only has a single quit
actions), and leave window specific actions in the window's menu bar.


> Anyways, there are some questions everyone seems to have overlooked:
> 
>         - You can open Activities without using the mouse, but then
>         you can't do anything. Meaning, you can't use the arrow keys
>         to select a running window, or a workspace, or an app on the
>         launcher, or even use Tab to go from one section to the other.
>         You NEED the mouse for those. Do you plan to implement
>         keyboard navigation?

Basic keyboard navigation in the overview has landed today - keyboard
focus can be moved to a particular element with Ctrl-Alt-Tab, then its
items can be navigated using the arrow keys.


>         - There IS keyboard navigation in the search results, after
>         you type a search term. But it surprised me to see that you
>         can only press up/down, not left/right, which makes navigation
>         very cumbersome. Would it be possible to implement all four
>         directions?

Tricky - left/right movements are currently consumed by the search entry
itself to move the cursor. I agree though that horizontal navigation
with up/down feels rather weird.


>         - The Desktop seems to be empty - in fact, even right-clicking
>         it does nothing. Do you plan to give it some use in the
>         future?

None that I'm aware of. Given that the deskop is hidden behind windows
most of the time, I'm not sure what interaction could be that useful
(apart from a shortcut to open the background settings maybe) ...

Not sure how well GNOME Shell plays with The Board[0], maybe that's
something to look at for people who like their deskop to be more than a
pretty background ...

Florian

[0] http://lucasr.org/2010/07/24/introducing-the-board/