Re: UI Changes

[Robert Park <rbpark exolucere ca>]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 10:48 PM, Alexandre Kaspar
<alexandre kaspar epfl ch> wrote:
> 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'm a huge fan of FF4's new menu that's a single button at left of the
tab bar. Huge space-saver for tiny netbook screens

> 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 like how in OSX you can grab the dead space within a toolbar and
drag the window from there. I always thought that was a nice touch,
especially for apps like iTunes that don't have much of a titlebar.

If Gnome is truly moving towards client-side window decorations, then
there's going to have to be some kind of "titlebar" widget included in
applications, which dragging initiates window movements. Once that's
in place, the same window drag logic could be applied to the dead
space in ToolBars and StatusBars nicely.

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

Meh, most windows only scroll vertically, putting a single scroll bar
at the right hand side. With the proliferation of widescreen displays,
horizontal space is plentiful but vertical space is precious. If the
scrollbars were shrunk any significant amount, the only thing it would
accomplish is that fixed-width websites would have a few extra pixels
of dead space in their left/right margins in my maximized firefox
window. What purpose does that serve?

-- 
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