Re: Two proposals for Gnome-shell

[Jesse Hutton <jesse hutton gmail com>]

I wasn't arguing that one was faster to render on screen. They're both so fast as to not even matter to a user. The new switcher makes it faster for one to recognize the target application one is searching for at a glance, much faster.

This is because icons are consistent in appearance and easy to recognize. The icon for Firefox on my Fedora 14 system is completely different than the icon for the Gimp, for example. Different colors, and somewhat different shape. And they're both different from the terminal icon and again from that for Chrome. Thumbnails all generally have the same shape and the scaling can make the colors and differences harder to perceive. Thumbnails are also not consistent, as they depend on the contents of the target. So, the Firefox thumbnail will be different from one moment to the next, depending on the web page it is showing at that time. This slows down visual recognition. Icons are faster for this. Part of this is also showing only one icon per app so the visual clutter is minimized.

Switching between windows of the same app is a different operation than switching between apps. With metacity in F14, you have the switch_group operation which uses the normal window switcher (showing a thumbnail if metacity is used as a compositing manager) and cycle_group which immediately shifts the focus to another window in the "group" or application. Mac OSX uses the latter approach of immediately switching windows with no preview (I don't recall any thumbnail view for their switcher, anyway), and has a default key binding. Both cycle_group and switch_group had no key bindings in F14 by default, IIRC. There should be a default for switch_group in GNOME Shell, or at the least, it should be easy to set a key binding. I think the overview, "expose", method of switching windows can be overkill.

Another nice to have is allowing the mouse to interact with the window switcher (which Mac OSX also does). I'm hoping GNOME Shell implements that, too. Again, I haven't been able to test it to see if it already does :(

Jesse

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 8:55 PM, Allan E. Registos <allan registos smpc steniel com ph> wrote:

I agree that icons would be simple and faster to render on screen. Yes, they are distinctive and consistent if you want to quickly switch to a different running application, but not anymore good if you want to switch to an instance of the same application. In this case, the super-key is the quick way to switch to an instance.

Regards,

On Wednesday, 09 March, 2011 10:50 PM, Jesse Hutton wrote:

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.

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