Re: Some thought about the shell idea

[Marina Zhurakhinskaya <marinaz redhat com>]

Hi!

Thank you for taking time to write in with your thoughts.

I like an idea of thinking of the dekstop overhaul as creating a graphical console that immediately enables you to do things. We are planning on incorporating such things as a better notification system, an intuitive desktop search, non-hierarchical file browsing, and an integrated IM client as part of the gnome-shell.

We are still experimenting with the overlay/workspaces/taskbar/task switching/tiling ideas. While we tried to hold off on re-introducing the taskbar, it turned out that it was one of the major components lack of which made the gnome-shell unusable. It seems that users like to be able to do rapid task switching back-and-forth, so the taskbar is back in, at least until we find a better solution.

One of the major reasons for introducing the overlay mode was that it makes workspace usage more intuitive. We are still experimenting with that idea in order to find out how useful and convenient workspaces can be. We have had conversations about allowing to tile windows too, and will possibly implement something similar to what you've been describing about being able to select multiple windows, right click, and tile them in one of the template tiling modes.

Marina 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniele Di Mauro" <daniele dm gmail com>
To: gnome-shell-list gnome org
Sent: Monday, February 2, 2009 11:23:34 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Some thought about the shell idea


Hi all, 
this is my first post on this list and first of all I want to thank you for the effort to make a nice, robust and open source desktop that i really love. 


I read most of the emails of the list, and the wiki pages about the gui hackfest in boston, i have also tried the shell a month ago, even if it's not really usable yet. 


I'm a bit confused by your ideas/work. 


A graphical shell, for me, should be a graphical console. 


Let me explain it a bit better. When you open a terminal you can do that things: 
- launch a program 
- move, create, delete file (file managing) 
- search for files 
- have feedback 


I'm a mac user since 3 months and if i have to think about what to steal from macosx i think of finder, spotlight, dock instead of the menubar (that for me it's not so confortable). 


A better gnome shell should have these capabilities: 
- a notification system like growl 
- a launch/search system like gnome-do (quicksilver) 
- a faster nautilus (thunar?) file manager 
- empathy for chatting 


Windows are, in someway, an old idea. I see, when i write some report, or some code, that i won't use more than 2 or 3 windows at the same time. This depends from our brain, that is not multitasking at all (one article about it: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/multitasking ). 


Instead of workspaces i think that several fullscreen windows in the overlay mode would be a nice solution. You may ask: How can we deal with more than one window at the same time? An idea could be to select the windows in the overlay mode and arrange them in some well known way, example: You need java api and netbeans one next to the other? click on activities -> select firefox and netbeans -> right click (or anything else) and select the voice vertical split, horizontal split or an other template you have (and if not exist, just make a new one). 


This will eliminate the need of taskbar (overlay mode became a taskbar). 


It's a kind of zui (as i've read a couple of years ago on jeff raskin website) 


There will be an exception: IM. I've no idea of to put them in that design..... maybe a system facebook-like using the top panel could do the trick. 


Those are my 2 cents.... maybe too evolutionary, maybe more complex to use than i suppose, but it seams, at least for me a path to investigate. 


Best regards, 


daniele 
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