Re: Why Favorites are not on the top bar?

[Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk redhat com>]

On Fri, 2011-05-06 at 11:04 -0500, Ryan Peters wrote:
> On 05/06/2011 08:46 AM, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> > Since top bar still exists, and the place where icons used to be
> > now is not used for anything, what about making it possible
> > to have Favorites *there*
>
> There are a lot of different screen sizes; some are big and some are 
> very small. GNOME 3 wants to be usable on a wide variety of screens, so 
> the top bar is not "user-owned", but instead "system-owned".

Great, it can be enabled per-user. So obviously,
mobile phone users won't enable it. Where's the problem?

> This is 
> much easier to manage from a developer's standpoint (less odd bugs, 
> simpler to code, etc.), and it also gives GNOME 3 a consistent visual 
> identity, making support much easier.
> 
> Also, GNOME 2 had an annoying problem where you had to manually position 
> every widget that wasn't placed by default. GNOME 3, by having a static 
> top panel that's system-owned, fixes this problem. In addition, the top 
> bar is extremely tiny.

Looks about the same width as Gnome 2 bar to me.

>  The dock for the favorites list is just as fast 
> to reach (especially if you use the Windows/Super key)

It definitely isn't as fast. Yes, it's not hard to reach,
but in Gnome 2 it was even *more easy*: one mouse movement
and one click.
Now it's "two mouse movements and one click" or
"a key press + one mouse movement and one click".

> and it's easier
> to click, especially with a low-precision input device like a laptop 
> touch pad, or even on a touch-screen device like an iPad.

How this would be different if basically the same Favorites IU element
would, say, slide down from, or enlarges the top of the screen,
when mouse is moved there? Imagine small Favorites thingy situated
to the right from "Activities" in the upper left corner...

-- 
vda