GNOME3 and au revoir WAS: systemd: please stop trying to take over the world :)

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2011-06-17 at 11:14 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On 06/17/2011 10:56 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > Adam Williamson wrote:
> >> This is a common misapprehension, but it's not true. The reason for the
> >> large icon grid is actually that the developers did real world user
> >> research (yes, really!) and found that many people had significant
> >> trouble navigating the typical Windows / GNOME 2 nested menu system full
> >> of wide-but-short entries. They would lose levels in the nesting by
> >> moving the mouse a bit wrong. They would launch the wrong thing because
> >> the target area was too short. This was especially pronounced with poor
> >> pointing devices - particularly cheap trackpads on cheap laptops.
> 
> Rest assured, it is not ... esp. on cheap trackpads on cheap laptops.
> 
> With Gnome3 you 1stly have to tick on "Applications" (located left top 
> on the screen)

It's a hot spot, and there's a keyboard short cut (as there was before,
so no change there).

> , then hit this tiny scroll bar located ca. 1 in/2cm left 
> of the right screen (not an easy task - Requires travelling almost the 
> whole screen), then to navigate down several pages to find the 
> applications your are looking for.

If you're not going to use keyboard search, you can use the categories,
which should reduce the choices to the point that you don't need the
scrollbar. You can also of course use wheel scroll, or the trackpad
equivalent.

>  When doing so, you often you are 
> getting lost in non-self explanatory icons, with cryptic icon-names 
> without tool tips, i.e you are not finding the app you are looking for.

None of these icons or names have been changed; it's still just an XDG
desktop menu spec implementation, so it uses the icons and names
specified in the /usr/share/applications/*.desktop files, as did GNOME 2
and as do KDE, Xfce and LXDE.

> When working inside of another window, you now 1st have to switch the 
> screen (to the Application screen), where formerly a simple "click into 
> the toplevel menu" was required.

Yeah, I don't like the tabbing in the overview either, and I've
mentioned this on the Shell list. It seems like the tabbing between
'windows' and 'applications' was a quick fix thrown in without a lot of
thought, and it rather compromises the original idea of the overview as
a single view. In this regard I preferred the F14 Shell implementation,
where applications and files were a sidebar on the left, with windows in
the main space on the right.

> 
> >> The Giant Grid O' Icons is navigable with a much higher success rate.
> I disagree - It's one of the aspects I am blaming Gnome 3 for to be 
> lacking of SW ergonomy.
> 
> A "simple application pane" is suitable for "kiosk-style" (smartphone) 
> installations with only a very small set of apps installed, but is 
> unsuitable for a "multipurpose desktop" with 100s or 1000s of apps 
> installed (such as home installations or developers' installations).

Hence the use of categories. A single scrollable list of 24-pixel high
entries for every app on the system wouldn't be very useful either -
that's why the 'start menu' has categories, and the Shell has the same
categories. But you don't lose your category if you move your mouse to
the wrong place on the screen, as you did with the nested menus...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net