Day: A New Approach to GNOME Application Design

You get fully maximised "windows" all the time. There are no distractions on the screen apart from the app you are running.

Never mind cut'n'paste from window to window, drag and drop and all the other stupid things. You don't need that mouse of yours. You don't need to be looking at a spreadsheet while doing your tax return. You don't need to see several shells at one. All that is for losers.

;-)

I never use maximized windows.
That's surely different on a tablet and maybe on netbooks.

Alex

I don't see why it's a big fail. Designing applications so that they are able to take proper advantage of being full screen is not a terrible thing.

There is no reason why it's safe to assume that he is talking about only allowing one window to be open at a time or being displayed at one time; if that is what you are doing.

As a *workstation* interface, then, GNOME's new target audience, is, what, 8 to 12 year-old developers? Having two windows open at once, the need to occasionally move them around or resize them, is too complicated for computer users? Having two windows open at once may require a user to perform two tasks in tandem and that's more than anyone should be capable of?

I hope I can be forgiven for saying it: "GNOME is for babies."

Clemmitt

If non-maximized, overlapping windows were a bit more usable (e.g. bring to front only with a click on the titlebar) then there would be less need to keep everything fullscreen all the time. It's probably too late, though; nontechnical users have never really learned about multiple-window interfaces and now they're probably never going to.

When you have high enough DPI, on a still reasonably sized physical screen, limiting applications to full-screen only mode makes less and less sense. Sure, design a nice interface _IF_ you go full screen, but, don't remove functionality that it becoming more useful in more markets.

It's pretty easy to receive benefit of having multiple windows open and viewable simultaneously. You don't have to have them both completely uncovered, just having the important, content areas can be more than enough in most situations.

All the time I'll have both a text editor and a web browser sitting side by side. Generally it'll be because whatever resource in the browser is useful for whatever code I'm working on, but there's been many times where I just throw a video up in the browser to semi-pay attention to, to keep me a bit amused while I work. That's very simple, and very straight forward. I don't have to constantly mess with the positions of both windows (like some people are acting like you do), and it only took me about to mouse clicks to set it up (click and drag one window, click and drag the other- both were already decently sized enough to work without issue).

If you're OCD about the overlapping... well, I don't see that as a reason to force the entire desktop paradigm to change for everyone else. Add a full screen mode to GNOME if you really want (I thought they already added that? I've yet to try GNOME 3 on a machine that it didn't simply take me to the failsafe desktop, so I've not gotten to experience it first hand), but not at the expense of the far more common, and far more useful situation.

Hell, I don't keep my browser window maximized simply because of the few sites that don't constrain the width of the text (reading a normal sized font on a wide display is fairly tedious, the lines become long enough that it becomes easy to jump between them without realizing). I've seen many other people express the same complaint about wide screen displays. On the other hand, I've yet to see someone use a computer and have major issues with the whole idea of using multiple windows simultaneously. I've seen people that make me simply cringe with how bewilderedly they seemed to operate the machine, and yet when in situations where they would benefit from multiple windows visible even they've not had issues with deciding for them self to resize and position the windows for simultaneous viewing.

Does it simply mean "someone stuck to old technologies and unable / unwilling to adapt to changes" ?

And you can and will be able to use multiple windows in gnome3 just fine. I am working with multiple windows and workspaces and I would not want to go back to the old style win95 interface.

So no the target audience is not "single application user" also the the blog is about applications maximizing themselves by default. You can unmaximize them, open other windows, resize them, move them around, tile them etc etc.

Not users that I've looked over the shoulders of. The vast majority of them have windows maybe filling up to 90% of the screen, but rarely do they maximize stuff (the only exception I've seen as a common case are people actively using a projector as part of presentations).

I'd really wager that most things _don't_ benefit from being absolutely full screen, especially with how common widescreen monitors are, especially since you lose the easy ability to glance at any other app (whether it's an IM app like dlang said, or some resource they're also using).

> Also, the only reasonable choice for a default size for a new window
> is maximized, since any other choice would be arbitrary.
For an application never-before opened it would be one thing (it would still be an arbitrary, and in a way, rude, choice, as it presumes that THIS app is the most important thing you're doing). For apps you've previously opened? They should default to the last size they were, THAT is truly the only non-arbitrary option.

If you start shoving maximized-by-default mode on people, though, new users quite likely _won't_realize_ that you can tile (even if only manually) windows, unless someone shows them (or they do it on accident). IMO, Desktop Environments shouldn't do anything to _exacerbate_ the dumbing down of the "average" computer user.

Quite frankly, I don't really think the "average" computer user is getting dumber. The vast majority of people out there did NOT grow up with computers, and the ones that did, didn't grow up with ones that had an interface all that similar to the current paradigms.

Hopefully one day I'll have a spare system powerful enough that GNOME 3 won't simply fail on it, so I can actually try it first hand to see if the various horrible descriptions of it are accurate... Personally, I've never been a fan of GNOME, and found the 'gnomeification' of various GTK apps I used to always be a major regression (I like my option windows, damnit!), so I don't have much confidence GNOME 3 was a reversal of anything.

I really doubt that. Most basic desktop users I know are completely lost if they cannot easily access the desktop (background), because they put everything on the desktop, so they always keep a part of it uncovered for drag-and-drop operation (they are unable to use a file selector).

On my main desktop, I would never maximize the browser because it is 1920 pixels across and a 20" monitor. Typically, my browser is about the same size and dimensions as a A4/letter sheet of paper. This about half the width of the screen.

Thinking about it a little more, if a given window has to be 75% or more of the width of my screen to be usable then I might just maximize it. All this proves is the "maximized makes sense for small screens" argument (for me). I am a little surprised though about how big "small screens" turns out to be (for me at least).

In my experience most "real" users don't maximize windows at all. Instead they carefully drag the expando until the window is big enough, which is sometimes approximately the same size as maximized, and then carefully position it in the center or top-left of the screen.

"Why don't you click the maximuze button instead?"

"The what?"

This happens all the time.

I strongly disagree. Many apps have very natural sizes. GTK+ in particular was one of the first toolkits to have good natural auto-sizing in widget hierarchies (I think, could be wrong).

Some windows have a bit resizable content area, and the size of that area is indeed "arbitrary." Things like the main windows of a word processor, web browser, image editor, etc. Other windows have extremely specific natural sizes based on their contents; there is nothing arbitrary at all about the window size chosen by the application when mapping the windows.

Even the apps with resizable content areas often have a decent "good guess" as to a natural default size that may not map to fullscreen. Web browsers are best off targeting a specific view area "resolution" for instance based on how Web sites are actually designed. e.g., they are generally made to fit something between 800 to 1024 horizontal virtual pixels, with any extra space "wasted" by whitespace; other sites just assume the resolution will not be much higher and so will gladly fill the extra horizontal space by making the main content very hard to read by stretching out text lines far beyond comfortable lengths.

How does having apps that maximize themselves by default break your terminal?

Instead of throwing random insults and flames you could better spend your time giving constructive feedback (as long as it is anything more useful then a reworded "I hate change").