Directions for GNOME 3.0 [LWN.net]

Directions for GNOME 3.0

Posted Oct 30, 2008 2:50 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
Parent article: Directions for GNOME 3.0

> restrict Gnome to a single static panel

Yes, please, but only as long as the word _static_ is taken out of that sentence. Current default with two panels just wastes user's time on moving the mouse up/down the whole screen all the time. However, users should be able to put their own stuff into the panel (i.e. the panels should not be static).

If more real estate is needed for stuff on the panel, we should have a corner panel (i.e. something that covers, for instance, top and left side of the screen, so that things are kept close to each other, not far apart like now).

> doing away with the idea of static workspaces

As long as the point here is the word _static_ (i.e. preconfigured number of workspaces). It is absolutely essential to avoid the classical Windows/Mac look where gazillion windows overlap each other and create unmanageable mess.

And it is not true that regular users don't know about workspaces. I support some that are so used to workspaces, that not having would greatly confuse them.

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Directions for GNOME 3.0

Posted Oct 30, 2008 15:15 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> If more real estate is needed for stuff on the panel, we should have a corner panel (i.e. something that covers, for instance, top and left side of the screen, so that things are kept close to each other, not far apart like now).

Heh.

Maybe the Gnome folks will fix the panel so it works vertically.

Typically now I simply eliminate the bottom panel. It's the first thing I do when running Gnome. I much prefer to have the bar at the top.

However when I worked call center it was invaluable to have the 'big fat panel' on the right side of the screen. Which XP was able to handle quite well. When coming to work I would always open up applications in the same order. This way when I was talking on the phone and needed to find information or a window immediately without interrupting the flow of the conversation I could find what I needed without any hesitation or thought. Time was very critical and stopping to go 'ummm' and 'ehhhh' as I clicked around windows looking for stuff just pissed off the already irate user and made my job harder.

Alt-tab is too slow and the fact that windows would be arranged based on the last ones I used was not particularly useful. A horizontal taskbar simply did not take up enough screen area to present a large target and a efficient way to list the large number of windows I needed to use.

With the way the LCD screens are made nowadays, being widescreen, means that having a horizontal bar presents a better use of space for many people.

Directions for GNOME 3.0

Posted Oct 30, 2008 15:47 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Oh.

> With the way the LCD screens are made nowadays, being widescreen, means that having a horizontal bar presents a better use of space for many people.

Oops. Ment to say 'vertical' there.

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And besides the brokenness with vertical placement there is another set of irritating bugs that they need to fix...

Namely Gnome's multidisplay support blows.

Now that I have a laptop with a working Intel driver and the ability to hotplug displays I run in all sorts of nagging issues with my laptop and Gnome. My laptop will run for days, but I will frequently use multiple displays on and off:

* When you arrange icons in Nautilus with displays on top of one another Nautilus will happily use the entire available desktop area irregardless of which monitor the icons will land on. This leads to irritations like Icons cut in half at the edge of the screen and unreachable files after you disconnect a monitor and resize the desktop. So after disconnecting displays I am forced to re-arrange the icons. This totally defeats any sort of spatial referencing of files.

What should happen is that Nautilus needs to take into consideration the desktop and make sure that, at least, you don't have unreachable files.

* When running multiple monitors a bottom Gnome panel the bottom panel gets ignored. So when you have maximized applications the bottom edge of the window is shoved under the panel. This isn't a problem for most apps, since the bottom of the window is usually wasted, but for browsing I like to double check the URL of links before I click on them.

* Adding monitors, and arranging them in a 'stacked' manner can cause the panel to then be at the bottom of the top display and if you try to have a window that spans both displays (like Blender, for example) you end up with a Gnome panel floating around the middle of it. Something a bit more deterministic needs to happen with this.. instead of having the bottom panel be on the bottom of the first display, it probably should just be at the bottom of the desktop.

* When adding and deleting monitors the amount of horizontal display resolution will change. This causes the icons on the Gnome panel to re-arrange themselves. Same thing with dragging the panel around sometimes, I think.

The _order_ of the icons/applets is much more important then the spatial placement.

So one huge improvement that the Gnome panel can have is have 'gravity' to the left and right of the panel (or up and down in a horizontal arrangement). That is, when a person places a applet or application launcher on the panel it should automatically 'fall' to the left or the right and smoosh up against other icons. Then the order of the icons/applets need to be kept, and not how far left and right they are on the panel.

Then for people that want to have icons a bit isolated on the panel to make it easier to avoid clicking something next to it. You can add a invisible 'padding applet' that simply takes up a configurable amount of space and doesn't react to left clicking.

Right now I am just very irritated that every time I change my display the order and placement of the icons get scrambled.