As far as a messy desktop goes I'm in the same boat. In fact that is one of the reasons i love the stack idea. the papers on my desktop ain't evenly spaced out in a grid i pile related things together. basically I'm mentally tagging them. I love the idea of being able to lasso a group of files and have them stack on my desktop i could then tag making it basicly a sexy looking folder. If i want to see the files in the stack i click on them and the rest of the desktop darkens and my files explode out to a grid. i can also search for the tag in the overlay.
...at least thats how i imagine the stack idea. Foor On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 12:35 PM, Cosimo Cecchi <cosi...@gnome.org> wrote: > On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 10:28 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote: > > > As a start, here is what the gnome-shell design docs say on the desktop: > > [cut] > > Right, I already read that paragraph, and I do not completely agree with > it. IRL, the top of my desk is as messy as my desktop, I'm fine with it, > and I know many people who have even more mess on it, and are fine with > it too ;) > I don't want to say that confusion should be a goal, but different > people develop different mental patterns when it comes to look for > things, and I think the desktop is a perfectly flexible space for this. > > Removing the ease to save files on the desktop seems a bit to me like > forcing a pattern to people, and a waste of incredibly useful space > (unless we are going to reintroduce something like Piles, but I'll > comment on that later on). > Sure, we could do a lot better than we do now for people who want their > desktop to be tidy (ensure we never overlap icons would be a good > start :)), but these are just implementation bugs IMO. > > > Yes, its quick to reach, but so is the activities overview (press the > > windows key or move the mouse to the top-left corner. It all depends on > > why you want to reach the desktop. If its for something like launching > > an app/location then doing that via the activities overview is as > > efficient as the desktop (and its an advantage imho to only have one > > consistent way to do this). So, this argument is only valid if you're > > doing something you can't do on the activities overview. > > I agree with you for the application case (though I'd like even more a > gnome-do-like launcher). I'm not so sure about opening documents. Recent > files and files that are currently being saved on the desktop might > conceptually overlap, but they do not always do. So, unless we're going > to have a storage-like place in the overview (which IMO brings to a > problem, see some next paragraph), this is a big change in the > interaction model. > > > It is very big, but its often covered and its limited in space (and thus > > doesn't scale). Its also problematic in that its fixed size changes when > > the resolution changes meaning you might "lose" files when that > > happens. > > > > The main advantage to the desktop is really that its a logical default > > storage location for starting something and for temporary things that is > > easy to reach. If we remove the desktop the likely place that things > > like this would be done is the home directory, but thats not as nice as > > its full of stuff thats always there, so you can't easily clean it up or > > get an overview of only the stuff you've temporarily created. > > Yes, I agree. > > > Ideally it should be as easy to reach these with gnome-shell as the > > desktop, and if its not we should instead fix it. Using the activities > > overview its pretty easy to reach a mounted volume as they are listed on > > the left. > > I think this brings up another issue: considering that most of the space > in the activities overview is taken by the workspaces view, we have to > deal with a limited free room there. On my Thinkpad X60, which has a > 1024x768 resolution, the activities view looks quite crowded, and we > have to carefully consider which things are worth to put in there. > Having recent documents + applications + search + volumes + a file > storage place seems too much to me. You could smartly hide/expand some > items, but this implies more clicks for the user to reach a target. The > desktop as it is now, instead, seems to nicely fit the purpose of > showing volumes and working files. > > This could be an issue in netbooks as well, where a 1024x600 screen > resolution seems to be standard. > > > However, for the case of a newly mounted volume we should probably > > integrate with the shell notification system so that plugging in a cd > > will show you some notification that this is now availible, letting you > > quickly click on it to open the mounted location. > > Agreed. This is orthogonal to the desktop though IMHO. > > > I'm always worried about adding non-file things to the nautilus views. A > > lot of people has historically used gnome-vfs modules + nautilus to > > create "lists" of things (fonts, themes and whatnot). This is almost > > always a bad idea. All of the nautilus UI is specialized at showing > > files and their properties. And the operations available on items expect > > them to generally act like normal files. Adding other types of objects > > always leads to strange behaviour due to this. (Not to mention that a > > custom list dialog could contain the special features needed to make > > listing the new type of object better.) > > > > Additionally I think its kinda unexpected to open the file management > > application and have its search return a preference dialog. Especially > > with the new focus on "file management" rather than being a shell. > > > > However, it would be cool for instance to have the search results in > > gnome-shell have a link in the "files" section of the results that > > opened up a nautilus search. > > > > It would also be nice if the search result picked up things like custom > > icons and emblems from nautilus. And if the files had context menus with > > things like "open with other...", and "show in file manager" operations. > > I agree with you here. > > > What do you think of my proposal about piles? > > I'm not a big fan of auto-hiding/sliding interfaces, and there's already > a near hot corner :) > I'd rather either see them on the desktop itself, like a small file > view, or in another keystroke-triggered layer over the applications, so > you can easily DnD to/from them. Also, I have to think more about it, > but we could associate them with a name and make it real folders on the > filesystem (with symlinks?), under ~/Desktop, with a default one which > is ~/Desktop itself. > > > > By the way, if we're going to stop drawing the desktop, what would be > > > drawn on it and who would be responsible for that? > > > > If nautilus just stops this then the default will be for > > gnome-settings-daemon to set the desktop background and for X to render > > it. However, if gnome-shell instead managed it we could do nice things > > like having different backgrounds for different workspaces. > > I think I did not make myself understood with my last question: what > would be on the desktop after Nautilus stops drawing it? Would it just > be empty? > By the way, there's a patchset for libgnome/Nautilus to handle different > backgrounds right now :) > > Cheers, > > Cosimo > > _______________________________________________ > gnome-shell-list mailing list > gnome-shell-l...@gnome.org > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list >
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