GNOME 3 Marketing - GNOME Shell

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

GNOME Shell defines the GNOME 3 experience; the visual changes connected
to GNOME 3 will be the first thing that any user of GNOME 3 notices;
GNOME Shell also brings substantial changes and improvements in workflow
- for how users use GNOME day to day. So the shell be the center of how
we are planning for how to market GNOME 3.

(It also should be expected that any negative publicity that might be
around the GNOME release - whether around the changes to the user
interface changes, about the increased hardware requirements for
graphics hardware, or about any stability or performance problems - will
be centered around the shell.)

This mail attempts to summarize a few top points for marketing the GNOME
3 experience. I may well be forgetting some things here; hopefully
Jon McCann (on the cc) will fill in as necessary. Also see the design
document available from:

 http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design

for more details and conceptual background. What I've tried to do below
is to concentrate on things that can be easily explained and shown
visually.

* The main view of the GNOME 3 user experience provides a clean,
  focused, view of your current task.

* While focused on the current task, the user is unobtrusively notified
  about things they might care about via the message tray:

   - Notifications slide in to let the user know about things
     they might care about.
   - Quick replies and simple manipulations can be accomplished
     by interacting directly with the notification without having
     to switch contexts.
   - Past notifications and current background activities (like music
     playing) can be accessed by going to the status area which
     slides out from the lower right of the screen.

* The overview provides a single point to switching between tasks,
  it unifies switching to an existing task and opening up an
  application or document.

   - The overview can be quickly activated by a hot corner at the
     upper left of the screen or by a keyboard shortcut.
   - For users who need more space or prefer grouping their
     tasks together, workspaces are exposed in an intuitive way.

* Search is a primary way accessing things the user cares about;
  as soon as the overview is activated the user can start typing
  and relevant matches of different categories will be shown
  and can be selected with the keyboard or mouse.

* GNOME 3 builds upon over 10 years of GNOME development: while
  there are major changes to the user interface, all current
  applications still work, hardware and system integration works
  as before, and so forth.

There are some important things that are still flux for 3.0:

* Accessing files - there won't be any major changes to how
  applications store files on the file system, and Nautilus will
  also be largely unchanged, but we do want to change from a very simple
  recent documents list to a richer browser that can be much of a
  primary way to access to files.

* Widgets/gadgets - we do expect to have a system for widgets/gadgets
  in GNOME 3 - lightweight non-applications to view data or perform
  quick actions. However, the current sidebar in the shell is
  certainly not how we expect it to look, and probably not how it
  will be accessed either.

* Final visual appearance. GNOME 3 will have an integrated visual
  look including the appearance of the shell panel and overview,
  window decorations, notification icons, window borders, and
  possibly some amount of changes to the widget theme as well.

I'll follow up with a link to a detailed GNOME 2.31 development roadmap
for the shell later today when I get that posted to live.gnome.org.

- Owen