UI Changes

[Alexandre Kaspar <alexandre kaspar epfl ch>]

+1, I don't like the point of having menus everywhere.

I've heard there will be a new "application" menu at the place where we
have the application name / icon. What about using the remaining free
area for the current window menu (i.e. the one we currently target) ?

I know there's an obvious trouble with the target since if it's the one
in focus, then we have to click on a window to access its menu, but we
could think of the current target as the one the mouse is over.
Although I don't really like that version either... I'd find it a pain.

What I am sure is that for many applications, I don't like the current
waste of space. Often, the menus are just not useful in the frame of the
window, whereas we could easily put them in the title bar (which is
almost free now, complete waste of space in my opinion) !

And I guess it's not that complicated since there's already a
global-menu which somehow works with GTK. I currently really like Ubuntu
next UI design, even though I'm on Fedora and will probably stay there
for some more time...

The current UI changes I would like to see :
1. Move the window menubar somewhere else, either the firefox 4 way, or
merging menubar and titlebar in some other way. I know we need to keep a
somewhat large empty space to grab the window (even though we still have
the ALT+Grab way to move windows, we need a Mouse-only way which isn't
too hard).
I guess the best would be to keep the titlebar, remove the menubar and
use window name (which we'd put on the left) as a point of access to the
menubar menu.

2. Use contextual optimization of the UI such as for the scrollbar which
do not need to be completely displayed all the time.

Scrollbars are wasting space, and if we want to minimize them, then the
ergonomy just blows up. Shuttleworth's point of view [1] is the good one
in my opinion. Just minimize the scrollbar completely (remains a small
line highlight to mark the scroll range / position), and generate an
over-scrollbar when we need one, i.e. when the mouse come close to the
highlight.

----

But what about these potential changes, where should they be implemented
and how ?
Can we act on the titlebar ? I guess by using GTK information or other
new application / .desktop information we could generate the menu in the
titlebar.
What about the scrollbar ? I guess it's completely to the UI to take
care of it, i.e. GTK/QT/whatever related ?

I personnally think the current state of the UI is not really elegant.
There are good attempt to improve it ( I really love the new menus of
Gnome-Shell in the status area ), but there should be more. UI design
didn't really change for the last 10 years almost... (ok, that's
sarcasm, changes happened, but they were really minor)

And even though GnomeShell is a good change, it's really minor
relatively to what I thought it could have been. There's a change, yes,
but it's not radical enough.

Hoping there'll UI will evolve a bit
Alexandre Kaspar 

[1] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/615

> Hi, I just want to give my opinion. I think that Gnome-Shell waste a
> lot of 
> space in my little screen, we have those Big window titles, with those
> Big 
> controls; we have a panel with a lot of empty space and no way to
> autohide...
> 
> Whats the plans for the menus? I think that Unity global menu is a
> great way to 
> get more screen for the user; or the chrome-firefox style.
> What about a compact theme? 
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