[Usability] Panels and Usability

[Estradin Solaris <estradin gmail com>]

Hi,

 

I've been thinking a lot about the gnome panel lately. I think the top panel is impeccable: it has two different areas, top left for system-wide apps & applets and top right for system-wide information. That's cool. Now, the bottom panel is quite a mess in my opinion. Being a sort of Dock-Taskbar hybrid it is neither here nor there. It may be deformation from using OS X, but when i want to focus an application I tend to click the launcher icon, and not the taskbar button. Why? Because having the launcher there after having launched the application is redundant. Why would i want to run seven different instances of Evolution? I only want one. Having the launcher icon transform into a proxy for "bring focus to all the windows of this application" after the app is running would be quite useful, and I think more intuitive.

 

Another possible use of this 'proxy status' would be when Firefox has only the downloads window open. How do I open a new window from there? I have to relaunch Firefox. Firefox on OS X, on the other hand, reacts to clicking in the dock icon by opening a new browser window. It is probably what you were expecting when you clicked there, so in my opinion it's flawless behavior.

 

Now again, I'm not saying the taskbar is useless. On the contrary, it is quite useful, but i think it would be a lot more useful when used together with the proxy-enabled launchers, functioning as a complement: when i want to choose a particular window, and not bring all of the application to the front.

 

This proxy-enabled launcher would pose a quite difficult question. Should it take this approach a step further and represent in the launcher part of the panel proxy icons for those applications that are running but are not in the launcher? I would like it, certainly, but that's most likely because I am a mac user. Trying to think without bias, i think no. But I am not sure.

 

What do you think?