Re: Two proposals for Gnome-shell

[Jesse Hutton <jesse hutton gmail com>]

Showing icons in the app switcher (and only 1 per application) is *exactly* the right thing to do. It has nothing to do with admins and developers vs the rest of the world. (As one confirmation of the approach, Mac OSX has done this for a long time).

The reason it's better and faster is simple. Icons are more distinctive, and they are consistent. If you want to switch to Firefox, for example, and you hit alt + tab, the symbol you're looking for will always be the same, so it's extremely easy to find. Having to look for a particular window and then the contents of that window is much more frustrating.

Also, keep in mind that alt + tab is an APP switcher. Showing one icon per application is correct. Another frustrating thing with the current approach in compiz/metacity is that if you have 10 terminal windows open, for example, and you just want to get to firefox, you may have to tab through all 10 terminal widgets. This wastes time, and again makes quick scanning more difficult.

If you are using gimp or some other application (terminal in my case) with multiple windows, the simple work flow to use is: 1) alt + tab to the application, 2) alt + <key binding> to switch between windows of the same app (is there a default for this in GNOME Shell?). I haven't been able to test GNOME Shell much because of an ATI driver issue, but I believe you can even chose windows of an app from the main switcher in a submenu.

Jesse

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 12:23 AM, Allan E. Registos <allan registos smpc steniel com ph> wrote:

On Wednesday, 09 March, 2011 01:16 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:

actually, having used the plugin someone kindly supplied that gives
thumbnail+label on my laptop but the stock setup on my desktop for the
last month or so (yay quasi-empirical data!), I kinda prefer the stock
(icon + label) setup. I think the reason is that the previews render so
small in the Shell switcher that they're hard to see; I like the
thumbnail setup in Compiz but I think it renders the thumbnails a lot
bigger...
--

I can't test the Shell for the moment, because my GNOME 2.x got messed up with a black(kind of black hole) desktop with an error warning from GNOME power manager.

However, if for some technical reason, the Alt-tab's thumbnail preview can't be scaled to a degree where we will no longer use a magnifying glass, then it is fine for the moment. Alt-tab + icons must be user-friendly enough for developers and system admins, while the rest of the world will not find it helpful to switch between instances of an app. Hoping for an extension or patch for this after the general release...

Kind regards,
Allan


--
There must be a computer language that is 100% visual, but runs at the speed of the C language.

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