[gnome-love] Re: [Nautilus-list] GNOME user environment brainstorming

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On 24 May 2001 19:19:13 -0400, eem12 cornell edu wrote:
> Two cents from a list lurker ...
>
> On 24 May 2001, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>
> > Somewhere to Start
> > ===
> >
> > A problem with the current desktop is that there's no clear "center" to
> > it where you can find important information such as the control
> > center, help browser, etc. We work around this a bit by adding
> > shortcuts to the panel, but other than that you have to dive in to the
> > forbidding and totally unusable Programs menu. If you change your
> > panel icons, suddenly you can't find important stuff.
>
> IMO, the complexity of the Panel should be controlled by user levels as 
> well.  Will novice user understand the idea of multiple desktops? Will 
> they ever even have enough windows open to need it? 
>
> Along the same lines, in Beginner mode the Foot icon should probably have 
> a tooltip or some other means of drawing attention to it (perhaps pulsing 
> for a few seconds after login?), if that's going to continue being the 
> suggested way to launch apps.  IIRC the original Win95 Explorer had an 
> animated arrow that highlighted the Start Button.

That was 100% useless because the Windows "Start" button looked like a
button, the Gnome Foot menu doesn't look like it can be clicked.

That said, the Apple menu in MacOS doesn't look like it can be clicked
either, but everybody knows the apple is the logo of the company the
software of which they're using. Maybe the splash screen of
gnome-session should show the Gnome logo, even if it's been changed by a
VAR (like Ximian does).

<snip>
> > Miscellanea
> > ===
> >
> > - unlock screen dialog from xscreensaver is ugly and doesn't look 
> >   integrated, and the entry won't be accessible, use the standard
> >   key shortcuts, etc. So we need a GTK-ized xscreensaver unlock dialog.
> >   This will get jwz flaming left and right, and requires some
> >   nontrivial engineering due to suid issues, but such is life.
>
> Call it gscreensaver :)

Talked to Jamie about this long ago, he is wanting to take patches to
change the default look (to something more sober like xlockmore has for
example), but no GTK+ port...

Cheers

-- 
/Bastien Nocera
http://hadess.net