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

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2011-06-17 at 17:20 +0200, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 3:59 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2011-06-14 at 01:19 +0200, Henrik Wejdmark wrote:
> >
> >> My impression is that GNOME3 is trying to compete with Android and FrontRow,
> >> but have forgotten all of us who still uses desktops/laptops. We don't have
> >> touch screens yet....
> >
> > 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.
> 
> Hm, but then this problem was not at all solved. Every Important
> Application(tm) (i.e. Firefox, LibreOffice, Empathy) uses the same
> menu widgets, and uses nested menus.  A real solution would
> necessarily involve changes to the GTK menu widget (and, well, perhaps
> actually using the GTK widget set for gnome-shell).

Don't worry, that's coming next...

https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/AppMenu

> Currently, when I open the giant application grid, I get oversized
> meaningless pictures (yes, oversized - to even see the grid I had to
> click on the "Applications" label, which is much smaller than the
> icons),

Yeah, I don't like that tabbing either.

>  accompanied with some text in tiny font that is impossible to
> read at a glance, but apparently still too large to fit text on
> screen, resulting in "Wireshark Network An...".

Agreed again, the font is pointlessly small. These are all niggles,
though, and not major flaws in the design; just implementation details
which can be tweaked.

> And as for the keyboard search:
> * The grid contains two "Aktualizace softwaru" ("Software Update{,s}"
> in English) icons, and search returns one of them perhaps 80% of the
> time, and the other in 20%.  The old menu actually allowed developing
> some muscle memory to reach a specific item, the search doesn't.

This is something QA is currently trying to get the desktops to address.
We're hoping it'll be possible to avoid having identically (or very
similarly) named entries in the menus. Note that this isn't GNOME 3
specific, though - the names in question are provided by the
applications via the XDG desktop menu specification. All desktops use
the same names, and so have these two very similarly-named entries. It's
a bit more obvious in GNOME 3 because of the search feature, but that's
all.

> * Try typing "bittorrent": you'll get an image that I can best
> describe as one of the devices used to set off explosions in comic
> books, with "Transmission" written under it.  Why should the user feel
> that they want to start _that_ program?
>     Mirek

This is hardly unique to GNOME 3, again. Although if you're saying
'there should be tooltips', again, I agree - they wouldn't hurt any part
of the design AFAICT.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net