GNOME Shell defines the GNOME 3 experience; the visual changes connected to GNOME 3 will be the first thing that any user of GNOME 3 notices; GNOME Shell also brings substantial changes and improvements in workflow - for how users use GNOME day to day. So the shell be the center of how we are planning for how to market GNOME 3.
(It also should be expected that any negative publicity that might be around the GNOME release - whether around the changes to the user interface changes, about the increased hardware requirements for graphics hardware, or about any stability or performance problems - will be centered around the shell.) This mail attempts to summarize a few top points for marketing the GNOME 3 experience. I may well be forgetting some things here; hopefully Jon McCann (on the cc) will fill in as necessary. Also see the design document available from: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design for more details and conceptual background. What I've tried to do below is to concentrate on things that can be easily explained and shown visually. * The main view of the GNOME 3 user experience provides a clean, focused, view of your current task. * While focused on the current task, the user is unobtrusively notified about things they might care about via the message tray: - Notifications slide in to let the user know about things they might care about. - Quick replies and simple manipulations can be accomplished by interacting directly with the notification without having to switch contexts. - Past notifications and current background activities (like music playing) can be accessed by going to the status area which slides out from the lower right of the screen. * The overview provides a single point to switching between tasks, it unifies switching to an existing task and opening up an application or document. - The overview can be quickly activated by a hot corner at the upper left of the screen or by a keyboard shortcut. - For users who need more space or prefer grouping their tasks together, workspaces are exposed in an intuitive way. * Search is a primary way accessing things the user cares about; as soon as the overview is activated the user can start typing and relevant matches of different categories will be shown and can be selected with the keyboard or mouse. * GNOME 3 builds upon over 10 years of GNOME development: while there are major changes to the user interface, all current applications still work, hardware and system integration works as before, and so forth. There are some important things that are still flux for 3.0: * Accessing files - there won't be any major changes to how applications store files on the file system, and Nautilus will also be largely unchanged, but we do want to change from a very simple recent documents list to a richer browser that can be much of a primary way to access to files. * Widgets/gadgets - we do expect to have a system for widgets/gadgets in GNOME 3 - lightweight non-applications to view data or perform quick actions. However, the current sidebar in the shell is certainly not how we expect it to look, and probably not how it will be accessed either. * Final visual appearance. GNOME 3 will have an integrated visual look including the appearance of the shell panel and overview, window decorations, notification icons, window borders, and possibly some amount of changes to the widget theme as well. I'll follow up with a link to a detailed GNOME 2.31 development roadmap for the shell later today when I get that posted to live.gnome.org. - Owen -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
