mon journal - par Vincent - Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - Comments

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - Moacyr

Moacyr — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:07:50 +0100

I tried the gnome shell on fedora 12 and like a lot. I also tested with my family,and they liked but, we thinks that shortcut buttons to prefered applications was missing. So, I add the cairo dock to prefered aaplications and all feels confotable. With gnome-shell to prefered application was need more cliks to find a aplication with several uses. Cairo-dock use only 1 click. Finalizing my Desktop runs gnome-shell with cairo-dock to most used apps.

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - arvind

arvind — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 21:42:05 +0200

There's actually an advanced prototype of this (Giornata) from GeorgiaTech that goes beyond some of the ideas that gnome shell is trying out. It's based on a notion of activity-based computing - which is a lot like Gnome Shell's notion of activities, but goes beyond program launching and window management to integrate features for lightweight collaboration, information retrieval, and lightweight sharing & communication. While Gnome Shell is an exciting development for me - I think the project team would find it extremely useful to take a look at the documentation around this prototype, which was presented last October at the UIST conference:

Voida, S., Mynatt, E. D., & Edwards, W. K. (2008). Re-framing the desktop interface around the activities of knowledge work. In Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (pp. 211-220). Monterey, CA, USA: ACM. doi: 10.1145/1449715.1449751.

a PDF version can be found at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~keith/pub...

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - nilux

nilux — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:25:49 +0200

Merci pour ta réponse!

D'autre part, je pense qu'il serait intéressant d'avoir une équipe comprenant développeurs et non-développeurs qui testeraient le bureau de Gnome 3 (et donc peut-être GNOME Shell) et donneraient leurs impressions sur l'intuitivité pour le rendre le plus efficace et universel possible. Une telle équipe existe-t-elle?

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - Vincent

Vincent — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:01:02 +0200

@nilux: il est encore un rien trop tôt pour savoir si ce sera le shell par défaut de GNOME 3.0, mais c'est une possibilité. La liste de diffusion est http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listi...

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - nilux

nilux — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:56:40 +0200

Salut!

Ce projet m'intéresse beaucoup, j'ai deux petites questions :
- est-ce qu'au jour d'aujourd'hui il est prévu que GNOME Shell soit le shell par défaut de Gnome 3.0?
- existe-il une mailing list officielle pour ce projet? j'aimerais suivre les discussions, et éventuellement participer (si c'est possible, sachant que je n'ai aucune notion de programmation mais que je suis très intéressé par la question de l'intuititivé de GNOME)

Merci d'avance pour ta réponse!

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - Eugene

Eugene — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:16:05 +0000

Rereading my post: "standardize the interaction in any way" is not quite what I meant. Enforcing something that isn't natural for the user to do and not allowing to switch to the way he/she is used to - that is bad.

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - Eugene

Eugene — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:11:06 +0000

I would really like for something like that to be available OPTIONALLY, at least until the users mostly agree that using the desktop in this way is much easier for most of them, and even then ths shouldn't be enforced. I actually like that I can make the panel look almost like anything I want. What I would like is even more customizeability, rather than less. If you standardize the interaction in any way the only benefit the user will get is that s/he can apply her previous experience with the desktop on one PC to another PC with the same desktop, but the user will automatically loose the ability to be more productive by configuring the desktop for his/her specific way of interacting with it. Not only that, but you will also make it harder for distro makers to customize their distro, since they will have to fork gnome shell (can you imagine how many forks that will produce?).

As for removing icons from the desktop but leaving the setting in gconf: if you do that, make sure you have a way to enable it through some sort of desktop configuration utility. Don't take abilities away from users - add to them instead. The simpler it is to configure the program (desktop) to ones liking, the more that user will want to use your program (desktop).

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - Yu

Yu — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:44:54 +0000

The wasted blank top panel can be occupied by Global Menu, if and only if applets are not thrown away, and until GNOME totally switch to SUGAR and get rid of menu bars at all.

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - Sławek

Sławek — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:28:52 +0000

I don't read any suggestions(so sorry), but I have my own idea. First the GNOME should suggest application not only by activity, but also by currently active task/window. For ex.: We open a nautilus and show activity menu. We have now apps/actions suggested by workspace and some stuff we can do with nautilus(open a terminal Window, Open a trash in new Window, Open with image browser). With Firefox we should have bookmarks sub menu, with contains something else to any desktop. If we have opened Firefox on family workspace, we have social based web pages. On "work" workspace we have bookmarks to our projects. This require some additional subsystem to store our bookmarks in GNOME. I must tell u, that Plasma works on some similar thing. You should working together to create one good mechanism to ask graphical environment about current context.
Other idea are special side of screen. On full screen mode we don't have Windows borders, so we should but there some sliders. We can drag sliders and open new place to Window. We can now select some task from new space. It should works similar the activity menu. It may be possible to switch between virtual desktops/context on it(for ex. by double clicking on it). Good thing is to show something like Window Caption if mouse hover on them. If we click on Window title on that caption, it should be displayed preview of all Windows of Current task.
Another idea is to have task overview. It should be attached to central desktop view and we should have button on top panel to open it. We should have these controls on it: calendar, notes, bookmarks or places or locations, last opened documents.

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - Adrian

Adrian — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 22:54:16 +0000

Hi,

I'm no gnome developer, i'm just a simple user (for 3 years now), and all i have to say, can you just make gnome run faster, and maybe (if the user wants, like metacity compositor) look better? :-) If a user wants to make his desktop look like your sketch, he must be able to do this (maybe use a profile?). From my point of view, the important improvements should be: speed/memory, usability, options and last eye candy (and eye candy should not restrict anything, enabled only if the user wants this).

I apologise for my English.

Thanks,
Adrian.

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - eTM

eTM — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:16:21 +0000

My Desktop looks like this now:

www.pri.univie.ac.at/~man...

* 3 hot corners in use
* 2 panels
* I use desktops task oriented (like activities)
* I hate top and bottom panels, I hate your mockup :-)

Don't remove the flexibility to set it up like my desktop now (only one panel in a fixed position?!)

Activities: activities are not "browse web" and "answer emails". Activities are:

"work on a project which includes e.g. using the terminal, browsing around and answering mail, switching hamster applet on and off, chatting with project members in an IRC channel"

What I want to know about activities:

* How long have i worked on them
* what files have i produced
* what messages have i exchanged with others (be it mail or irc)

eTM

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - Livio

Livio — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:57:52 +0000

I say yes to new menu applets, but no to features removal, sorry.

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - Natan Yellin

Natan Yellin — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 19:53:25 +0000

Matt,
At least some of the references to "most people" are based on David Richard's presentation at the hackfest. (See live.gnome.org/Boston2008...

David deployed GNOME at the government offices in Largo, Florida and was able to give a huge amount of feedback on how normal people use computers.

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - Dylan McCall

Dylan McCall — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:07:48 +0000

This would benefit particularly if we beefed up file handling to be more sensible, for example remembering what programs were used to work on certain files and providing options for particular "actions" that can be performed on files in a way much like "Open with" but a bit more understandable. In addition, it would help if the shell was more consistent with applications it launches so that "files" in the file manager sense stopped being files and started being documents, graphics and whatnot as they are in their more specialized tools.

An example of where that could lead is that a lot of the time there is way more than one program devoted to an activity. In GNOME each program is meant to be quite a simple tool that performs a single specific set of tasks, so it is really that a /file/ represents a workspace, with the different programs surrounding it. In a sense, I think the application launcher should be nerfed and replaced with an organized listing of files. Those files, naturally, would be the different Activities, or Workspaces, or whatever else suits your fancy. Should fit any kind of content creation or viewing tools, and I think even configuration tools and games should ideally be able to support that type of thing.

Some steps to take for getting there:
-Annihilate the arbitrary number of workspaces. Instead, Metacity should always maintain a fresh new workspace when another gets filled.
-Nautilus and other programs should cooperate better being open on different workspaces. No logical explanation why Nautilus can't have the same directory open in two windows on different workspaces in Spatial mode. At the moment the behaviour is confusing.

This looks like a step in the right direction. As for how the sidebar behaves, I hope you imagine it as always open, generally beneath all windows but popping up when that Activities button on the panel gets hit :P

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - Matt

Matt — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 07:43:32 +0000

Looks like it could have potential. I'm curious about your mention of "most people" (4 times) - what research has been done on how the current desktop is actually used (and how large a proportion is "most")?

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - glasma

glasma — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 05:16:54 +0000

ok you will copy plasma but please don't copy that awful plasma's panel (the gnome's one is not better though)

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - Phrodo_00

Phrodo_00 — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 03:59:36 +0000

Looks nice, and like I'd use it with what you said, however, there's always details, now remember, I'm probably a power user, I usually have several urxvts with several screen windows each on different servers, editing latex in vim and so on.
I'd kill if there wasn't a way to add the places menu into the menu, I don't care at all about the system menu, but ya dont touch mah madafuqin places menu (actually, you might want to add it tracker-like file search, but not a lot more). Maybe the item in the left of the panel could be a configurable place for putting modal shit, and you could select which ones you want, with activities being the default...
also, you will have to provide a docking mechanism somewhere, and let the incons that right now get in the notification area there, or else come out wth somethong else for long-running apps (like having their launcher icon act as their status icon once they are launched, so if you add a launcher to the panel it gets updated there, and you'd also want a place where you can see all those apps/actions running on background, in case people forget they forgot they started a torrent client and are wondering why the network is so slow)
Finally, and this is from more of a usability point of view (probably, I don't really know anything about usability) than the practical one I hade in previous... sugestions, is that there should be a stack for short-lived background stuff, like moving or downloading files, or syncing mail or whatever, exactly like that gsoc project from a while.

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - Allan Day

Allan Day — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:18:18 +0000

It's great to see this move to rethink the desktop, and I'm really pleased that you're trying to keep people informed and involved in this process. Keep up the good work!

I'm enthusiastic about the design direction being taken here (though I also recognise that there's still a lot of work to do). Your assessment of the inadequacies of the current desktop definitely tallies with my own experience. A couple of points about the design itself:

- The idea of activities is great - I've long thought that an approach which allows the dynamic grouping of windows would be a productive one. What I would be wary of here is trying to compartmentalise activities too much. In particular, activities shouldn't be conceptualised as things that users use in a premeditated fashion. New activities will flow out of existing ones, and the functionality we provide must support that. Users need to be able to move windows/applications between activities, easily switch between activities, merge them, split them up, etc.
- One thing that would be great to see developed in this redesign is how keyboard control will work. It would be great to be able to launch new applications and create new activities without having to reach for the mouse (think GNOME Do).
- Something that the new desktop will need to support is the ability to get an overview of what's happening in all activies. Imagine if someone goes for their lunchbreak - they need to be able to come back to their machine and say 'OK, where was I?'. We don't want these kinds of operations to be labour intensive - speed of navigation/observation have to be a priority.

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - bkor

bkor — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:39:09 +0000

jow: You're suddenly changing it from 'exactly like' to 'possible with'. Please read again what I responded to. Further, just because it is possible doesn't mean it is the exact same thing. Further, these a mockups. So why are you complaining?

Desktop Shell from the User Experience Hackfest: General Overview - oliver

oliver — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:07:06 +0000

I like the Activities idea... I use workspaces pretty much like that already (one workspace for mail etc., and the others for different projects), only that the number of workspaces doesn't automatically grow/shrink with the number of open projects :-) and that the workspaces with "paused" projects are visible all the time. Apparently Activities would solve that (by creating a new workspace when I decide to start a new Activity/Session, and maybe by being able to "suspend" an unlimited number of sessions by using some really nifty session-saving implementation).
So, if the Activities are implemented together with all the important desktop apps, it might remove the need for "Sessions" in all those different apps - even better, maybe it would finally allow me to open a single "Project XYZ" saved session and have Gedit, Glade, IPython console, file manager, DevHelp, browser... opened with correct files/folders/URLs all at once! That would be a really useful I think! I'm just not sure how useful that is for the "casual user" who mainly needs a "web kiosk" interface and an email app :-)