The zooming dock is really cool because it allows Fitt's law to be used, while also keeping the dock relatively small. The 'Desk Guide' thing is really not that great of an example of the dock: the dock is more like the WindowMaker dock or the Enlightenment Iconbox. The cool thing about the Enlightenment Iconbox is that it can take a snapshot of your window as an icon, but the problem is if you have 3 terminals open, it is hard to distinguish between them, which actually LESSENS their impact. WindowMaker has the good idea of putting a little title bar on each iconized window, which (when coupled with the naming of gnome terms that was discussed a week or so ago) would make the Enlightenment iconbox SOOOO easy to use. Also, maybe having a little standard icon/watermark for the app in one of the corners would help (a little netscape 'stamp' or 'watermark' in one corner of every netscape icon??) Personally, I think that a gnome iconbox, a la the Enlightenment iconbox but better, would greatly help the GUI. espectially if you added features that the gnome toolbar/MacOS Dock have, like allowing groups of aliases/shortcuts (like 'drawers' of shortcvuts), shortcuts to folders that you could drag and drop into, gnome applets, etc. etc. etc. There are a lot of things that can be done with the dock that I think apple is going to do... (OFF TOPIC, KINDA) I realized this weekend that the dock is actually a pretty slick implementation of a lot of the mac ideas. It basically synthesizes the finder menu in the mac's upper right, the apple menu of the upper left, the desktop icons, and the tabbed finder menus (if you haven't seen these, then don't ever use a mac, 'cause as soon as you see them, you will not want to use linux again....). The dock is a way to keep all of this stuff in ONE cool interface, and follow a lot of the user interface suggestions that people have had: make it all consistent, follow fitts' law, etc. The thing is, I think it would be pretty easy for gnome to follow suit. The new GUI for MacOSX is actually pretty darn sweet, and even if we had the FUNCTIONALITY without the 'genie effect' wiz-bang, we would still be ahead of the game. William Kendrick wrote: > Mark said: > > I was wondering what peoples opinion of a zooming dock is. I haven't > > used MacOS X, but I would imagine it work similarly to what the video > > shows on their site. Icons would represent thumbnails of the application > > specific content, > > Well, we already have something like this. > > As of approx. version 0.4 of Gnome's "Desk Guide" applet shows thumbnails > of windows, a la the pager in Enlightenment. (The one thing it doesn't do > (yet) is zoom-in when you hover the mouse over a thumbnail :) ) > > Also, Eazel's "Nautilus" GUI shell shows thumbnails of document content > when you're navigating around your filesystem. (ie, thumbnails of images, > the first few lines of text from text files, etc. One suggestion I had > when I saw Nautilus presented at SVLUG was to have oscilloscope views > of sound files, so you could start recognizing them by the shape of the > sound... or, at the least, tell which MP3 is louder than another, > for example. ;) ) > > -bill! > > _______________________________________________ > gnome-gui-list mailing list > gnome-gui-list gnome org > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-gui-list
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