Re: [Usability]A Challenge: Describe the GNOME 4.0 interface.

["Miguel A. Arévalo" <marevalo marevalo net>]

Adam D. Lopresto wrote:

> So how are the applets visually displayed?  Just embedded straight in the
> desktop?
Right, the panel concept nowadays is a part of the desktop which is 
always on top, so it's very easy to do it with the desktop manager (in 
this case Nautilus), you can put launchers on these always on top 
desktop regions or, as a natural extension, add applets inside them 
(menus, clocks, taskbars, etc.)

> Is there a menu of tasks?  How do you create a new document?
There should be this task menu for novice users, but almost all 
applications can be turned to be document centered (.desktop url files, 
irc://opennet.net/#gpul , saved games, game levels, etc. etc.) so the 
big point is making this document centering RIGHT.

Windoze 95 almost make it well, but you have to be a registry-guru to 
add new templates (or use the TweakUI app). In may opinión, Document 
Templates are as important as MIME types and its default actions and 
should be defined by the great people from OpenDesktop, they should be 
placed somewhere like /usr/share/templates and ~/.templates and 
installed with every package.

I'm gathering these kind of propositions in order to write some paper 
about it, you can browse some personal brainstorming at:

http://www.marevalo.net/papers/real_desktop/index.html

Hope this helps!