Re: gnome 3.0 shell concept

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sun, 2009-01-18 at 03:23 +0200, Eugene Gorodinsky wrote:
> Hi all. I've seen the gnome 3.0 concept shell with which people came
> up at gui hackfest. In my opinion it breaks away too much from the
> existing interaction model, and in some ways it makes it harder to
> work with the desktop than it is now. For example the second
> screenshot apparently makes the desktop zoom out at the press of the
> Activities button, this is something that in my opinion would confuse
> the user. 

Honestly, I have no idea whether the zooming will confuse users or not.

(Actually, I'd guess zooming out is OK. But the combination of zooming
out and moving windows around at the same might be too much going on.
Or it might be OK.)

Luckily, we have this implemented already so there's no reason to guess.
If someone (like you) is motivated, they can build it, round up up some
test subjects among their friends and family, and have them try it out
for a while and see if they figure out what is going on.

At this point, we probably can't make a final determination of good vs.
bad, since it's hard to distinguish:

 - An idea that could be tweaked into being good by adjusting the 
   details of animation/timings
 - An idea that would be good if more features were implemented to
   flesh things out (like dragging windows between workspaces)
 - A basically unworkable idea

until you add more of the missing features and work on the tweaking. But
certainly raw data about what people find neat, what confuses the heck
out of people, what people expect to work but doesn't would be really
useful.

> The mockups for navigating the applications menu are worse even, since
> the menu replaces the whole screen apparently. I beleive such a menu
> would make gnome unusable for me.

Wow, that's a sweeping judgment :-) We don't have the full applications
launching system implemented yet, but certain elements are there
already, so you can try it out and see how usable it is in practice.
(Marina is currently starting to work on the full-screen "More" for
applications.)

>  On the other side there were a few very interesting ideas in the
> document, which I would like to discuss.
> I've never before used virtual desktops, but after reading the
> document, I agree that they are a grat way of separating activities,
> or "contexts". Actually, the whole idea we group our activities by
> contexts has been quite enlightening for me, however I bselieve these
> contexts are sort of hierarchical, and not flat. This is actually the
> reason for inventing tabbed browsing and a bunch of other things. For
> example let's take an activity "programming an app": the programmer
> writes some code, but at some point is stuck and wants to search for
> information to help him with his task. The programmer then openshis
> web browser and starts to look for the solutions: he goes to his
> chosen search engine and enters some keywords, after that he gets the
> results which he must look through one by one. Now to do that he needs
> to open a window for each of them, especially if we consider that his
> solution can only be pieced together from several sources. What
> happens in this scenario is that writing/debugging code and using the
> web browser are part of one activity or context, but looking through
> the information using the web browser is part of a subcontext. This
> subcontext requires more than one window just like the programming
> context. So in reality, what I think happens is that while working on
> some task we constantly zoom in to take a closer look at some aspects
> of the task and zoom out to look over the whole thing and then zooming
> in to some other aspect of the task. In fact, I think that zooming in
> is quite a natural way of describing it all. 

There's quite a bit of literature out there on zooming user interfaces,
as I'm sure you are aware. The focus is usually a bit different though,
from what I've seen... often they involve something like putting all
your documents into a big space, and then zooming in to edit them.

The idea of mapping zooming to the user's dynamic work-flow is an
interesting one, and it would be interesting to see some more mockups of
how you see that behaving out in detail. For short-term work for the
GNOME shell, we are trying to concentrate mostly on what we can do
without modifying the applications much, but it looking ahead to future
work where we dig more into the application layer is important as well.

[...]

> Another idea I liked is the expose-like switching between windows. I
> really think it's a fine idea, however the user shouldn't have to
> solely rely upon it, the taskbar is a faster way of switching between
> windows and if the user is using the mouse to switch, they will
> appreciate that. 
> 
> I've been thinking of improving the management of workspaces as well.
> However instead of explaining I'll show the mockups I came up with,
> first.
> They are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/e.gorodinsky/Gnome#
> 
> The first mockup is showing the normal user desktop, nothing radical
> there and as is evident I'm not even trying to make the system easier
> to use for people who've only seen computers on TV but never even
> touched them. The reason is that you'll have to train these people to
> use the mouse, explain to them the basic concepts of interacting with
> a computer (what's a focus, why you need to click on the edit widget
> to type anything into it, or that you can click on some text and get a
> menu with more text etc.), so I don't think this will add up much,
> better to have a book or a video guide on how to use a computer rather
> than trying to make a computer so easy to use that the user wouldn't
> need to read a manual to use it. 

Trying to make the basic operation of the computer fundamentally simpler
really isn't in-scope for the GNOME Shell. After all, the user's real
work occurs in applications, and we aren't modifying them, much.

What we are trying to tackle are things like:

 - How do you manage lots of open applications
 - How do you navigate to a task you were working on 5 minutes ago,
   a day ago, or a week ago, and pick up where you left off

I tend to think of it as trying to make it easier for people to go from
very basic operation (launch a browser, create a word processing
document), to a more complex level of usage - to create ways of working
with the computer that scale.

> The second mockup is where clicking on that arrow in the first mockup
> will take you. I actually think a better place for this button would
> be the top right corner, but I'm not sure how to let the user know
> that the arrow has an entirely different function from anything else
> on the bar. The arrow takes you what I called a "meta space". The idea
> here is that by clicking and dragging the windows, a user could group
> them together and move them around as if they were pieces of paper on
> a table. The DE could then identify which windows belong to which
> workspace (i.e. virtual desktop) and add them to the task bar for that
> workspace. The workspaces could be created and deleted dynamically and
> also from this "meta space" the user can have the ability to click on
> any window and automatically switch to that workspace as well as bring
> the window they clicked on to the top.

A lot of these elements are already present in the current gnome-shell,
if you think of the overlay as your meta-space. You can dynamically
create an destroy workspaces, you can click on a window and switch to
the workspace. What isn't implemented yet:

 - Dragging windows between workspaces
 - Dragging application to workspaces to launch them on that workspace
 - Dragging recent applications to workspaces

These are all very approachable - they can be done pretty much
completely within the Javascript parts of gnome-shell in a couple of
hours apiece to get the basics there.

To me the sidebar in the overlay is very much part of this idea of
direct manipulation - your current windows are part of the things you
want to manipulate, but they aren't all of it. The document that you
want as part of an activity might not be open at the moment.

That's a long answer to a long mail. I think it's great to have people
looking at the mockups, and contributing their ideas. But I also think
it's important that this list doesn't turn into a lot of abstract
discussions about how things *could* work; I'd like it to concentrate on
what people *are* doing. I've mentioned some concrete tasks above. Some
other things:

 * It wouldn't be that hard to make change to the current overlay
   to make it much more like your second mockup. Doing the blur is
   a bit tricky, but making the workspace background not zoom out
   would be almost trivial. So you could experiment with that and
   compare it to the current overlay.

   [ I really wish we had gnome-shell in a DVCS already for things 
     like this... so people could publish a branch for other people
     to try out. But anyways... a patch works for now. ]

 * The sidebar feels like it will integrate very well with the
   workspace view ... dragging a recent file to a workspace. But how
   does that work when the file you want isn't in the short list
   in the sidebar and you have to go to the "More"? I'd like to 
   see some idea generation / mockups there. 

- Owen