Re: User interface suggestions

[Pasi Parnanen <pasi parnanen net>]

Calum Benson:
> Pasi Pärnänen wrote: 
> > I would like a icon-only menu with an array of icons that i could arrange 
> > myself. A sort of program palette with a changable size in multiplies of the 
> > icon size, perhaps. It could be a bit like a drawer, only 2D instead of 1D, 
> > and with no shrink-wrap effect... (I mean that in order to have groups of things
>  > there also has to be distance between them. The drawers don't have
> that.)
> 
> Sounds a bit like the Microsoft Office sidebar... which I have to say I
> use all the time on Windows, even though I never actually use Microsoft
> Office!

To me it's like having a hole open up to a "desktop" with only application icons on it. Not just a (horisontal or vertical) line of icons but a pad where i can place the icons in two dimensions. Please don't think "taskbar" but rather "pop-up scrollable chessboard". 

If i had this "board" or "palette" today i would put one column of visual apps like gimp and blender, another one for audio apps like xmms and gtcd and more colums for each category that i wanted. Using it would be faster than the multiple drawer setup i have now, because i wouldn't hit the wrong drawer button, and i could go from A to B diagonally if that was the shortest way. I can't do that now.  

But... If there was no "pointerpanning" then the "palette" could end up wasting my time the way so many apps do right now. Take a look the gnome menu itself. It wastes my time (and yours too i bet) because of the way it opens submenus, or rather how easy it is to end up the wrong submenu because the pointer is one pixel too high or low when i move it to the right. I would get to the right icon much faster if i had a "palette" with my tools (laid out in my own way) to open.

(There's a good name for the applet too... "open sesame!")

The stuff we have right now gets the work done without hiding things the way windows 9x and 2k do, but we can do better, IMHO. Other apps could also benefit from having a "palette" and "pointerpanning". 

Think about it, please. Would you replace gimp's tool palette with a menu hierarchy? 


-- inPasible
-- "i'm being obnoxious again... i'm stopping now... sorry."