Re: UI Changes

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 12:48 AM, Alexandre Kaspar
<alexandre kaspar epfl ch> wrote:
> +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...

It's very complicated. Ubuntu has the ability because they can patch
all the toolkits downstream.

> 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.

This will be easier when we get client-side decorations. Right now,
the window manager displays decorations
and the client paints the menu bar.

> 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.

On my screen, the width of the scroll bar is smaller than my cursor.
Not a big win for screen space.

> 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.

If you want to make the GTK patches to get client-side-decorations
working and looking good so you can merge the titlebar and menu bars,
feel free.

> What about the scrollbar ? I guess it's completely to the UI to take
> care of it, i.e. GTK/QT/whatever related ?

It is. Again, Ubuntu can do that because they can take GTK+, Qt, XUL
and UFO and glue ayatana-scrollbar into it without many people
complaining. The "gnome project" doesn't really have that choice.

> 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.

There's people who think it's too radical.

> 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?
> --
> http://www.wox-xion.ch
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-shell-list mailing list
> gnome-shell-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
>