> On Fri, 2009-12-18 at 17:43 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote: > > > More interesting things to discuss: > > > > - In what cases does GNOME Shell work less well? > > > > - How could the GNOME Shell ideas be adapted and extended to > > work better in those cases? > > The root of problems might be that you try to solve almost > everything by going to a special place: > - Starting apps > - Opening files > - Switching between windows > - Switching between workspaces > - Organizing windows on workspaces
I fully agree with this analyse of the situation. IMHO, workspace management should be a separate thing. Having a global view of all my active windows is "good" (and already exists today with top-right hot spot), but having this unconditionally when I just want run another application appears as a trouble to me. Yes I could get used to that, but getting use to an inconvenience doesn't appear to me with a goal to be reached. I didn't ran G-S since august, and I just tried last version. My comments are: - the application main menubar is no more detached from the main windows; I find this fine - I'd readen in this list that Activities should be "a big hot spot", but it appears to me as just a small one (some pixels or so). The text "Activities" is not itself the hot-spot. Shouldn't it be ? - drag-and-drop a windows between workspaces is fine: I do like this - when the sidebar is displayed (is that the "overlay" ?), having to click on "Applications" to have a menu is just a burden; we should be able to open the menu by just move the mouse over the "Applications" text - the "Applications" menu should definitively be categorized; having just an alphabetical-sorted list means we have a potentially very long list, that we have to scroll in.. Not very practical - when the "Applications" list is displayed, I had to explicitely close it (clicking on the top right (X)) in order to be able to open Last documents; here also I find this is a burden. Moving the mouse over the Last documents should close already opened menu and open this new one. - also display of menus (Applications or Last documents) is too long (almost 3 sec. here) - the central position of the clock in the top bar appears amazing; does this mean that the clock is supposed to have a central function in my daily work ? yes, the clock was always here since first versions of G-S, but, IMHO, it is time to give it a much widely waited placement (e.g. at the rightest side of the top bar ;-)) - also not new in this version, but I don't ever understand the function of having just the active application be displayed besides of "Activities" ? This appears as just an indicator (no menu or so) ? - The "Find" field is fine, but its behaviour is curious to me: when I type 'b', it displays 'brasero', 'blackjack', which is fine, but also 'configuration editor' and 'dasher': is this the waited behavior ? - I've replaced the standard Gnome taskbar with AWN. When I create another workspace in G-S, AWN Shiny Switcher displays new workspace below of previous one (as a column with two rows), but doesn't let me select the original workspace by clicking on it. When I create a second new workspace, AWN S-S displays them as a column of three rows (though I hardly see the third one which icon is mostly outside of the screen); I am then able to switch between second and third workspaces, but the first workspace seems definitively unreachable by click. So this appears as a compatibility problem between AWN 0.3.2 and G-S ? Or doesn't they have the same definition of what is a workspace ? - another point which appears to me as clumsy is the indicators displayed in Activities sidebar, whether the applications are currently active or just recently used, or by default; I talk about this sort of three small round blue spots, or an extended blue spot.. I find this clumsy from a11y point of view. I believe an emblem would be more visible, and it would be easyer to have more available semantics that with these spot indicators. Eventually, I would be very frustrated if I didn't give a very subjective and personal opinion. I'm always waiting for a new metaphor of the desktop interaction, which I believed was one of the first goals of G-S. What I'm seeing at the moment is rather a new sort of menu (imho, Activities is just another menu), but only new in Gnome, because already and long time used in other desktops (since xp I believe, which is several years old). So, as a developer myself, I'm very very frustrated to see so much time of so talented developers almost gratuitously spent in a try to reinvent from scratch some sort of already existing wheel (e.g. regarding the thousand of opened issues in Bugzilla, sometimes since years...). Though I do understand "politic" needs of having a "full new" desktop, I regret the choosen way to accomplish that. As usual, these were my own 2 cents. Regards Pierre _______________________________________________ gnome-shell-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
