I like the direction in which GNOME 3 is going, but it can be better. Just throwing some ideas into the GNOME universe. 
GNOME 3 Shell ideas
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
What people think...
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Looks pretty nice - I put one together a little while ago too - http://www.flickr.com/photos/90974384@N00/3276444810/sizes/o/
I like your mockups Stephen, you should join #gnome-art on irc.freenode.net!
Those mockups are wonderful - both Hylkes and Stephens
I like them… Especially yours, Stephen, it’s very visually pleasin’
Thanks Kris! Though I wanted to focus on the content part more instead of visuals.
I’m very interesting to see how the Shell shapes up - and I really like the ideas you put in your mock-up.
But one thing that jumped out at me was how visually similar the items in the left bar looked. I think Stephen really has a good idea with the blurred background image (and other nice touches he added). It makes the whole thing *much* more visually appealing
One word. AWESOME!
Hylke,
Yeah! I like it too, especially the fact, that the Actions-dropdown is used to show those nice informations as downloads - I was just ‘wow’ about the visuals Stephen made
GNOME 3.x will be so sweet
FAIL! Still application-centric instead of object-centric. I want to interact with documents, people etc instead of applications.
foo: never going to happen. i know what you mean but in practice not everything can be done object based on the desktop.
Fibonacci [1]?
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number
This is the first gnome-shell mockup I’ve seen that looks like it would actually add utility to my desktop. The Activities are actually activities! That you can interact with and understand! Very cool! Would love to see more of these.
Maybe having interactive activities is the answer to the applet question?
I would recommend using a larger image in your blog, maybe just zoomed into something interesting…you really can’t see anything in the thumbnail.
Sandy: yup! we can get rid of a lot of visual clutter this way, while still being functional. and applets are evil!
Andreas: You mean I should design it more like that?
Coool. I very like Gnome.
The first time I actually like the gnome shell
A thought just slipped to my mind.
Maybe the gnome-shell team should consider to seperate the menu- and activities-dropdowns. Make them a kind of “tabs”. Kind of how the menu is in gnome 2.x - just better, and more intuitive.
I think it will clutter it up if the sort of activities you, Hylke, have stopped into the activities-dropdown, and the menu-items will be mixed together.
Just a thought - what do you think, Hylke?
It would be interesting to see how your idea can combine with this:
http://www.geektechnica.com/2009/05/the-future-of-gnome-de-looks-promising/
which seems to make shortcuts on the panel intuitive. The key thing I don’t see is a clear way to distinguish open documents and recently used documents and/or “pinned documents” and/or “pinned applications”. Mac OS X might provide some inspirations.
I don’t like the reflection or the two hidden desktops, there is enough space for 6 desktops or in case of reflection it distracts too much.
The activities are very nice and would love the see information I care about about the programs I’m running like in your mockup.
Good work!
Cas: They are not reflections, I was afraid people would see it as such.
Gnome 3 won’t be sweet for sure, but rather impractical.
Too much ‘hardcoded’ throwing freedom out the window. KDE4 will become the best next thing soon. I’ll probably ditch gnome for good when KDE 4.4 will be released.
But i guess time will tell
Dread Knight,
Take a look at KDE 4 - it’s very long time since 4.0 came out, and it was a miserable release which should never had happened. So… I hope it will not take gnome FOUR releases to make an good release with full functionality.
In that way I think GNOME will be better.
That menu is beautiful. I’d love to have that.
But do you have any ideas on how we would start new activities or find recent documents (or take a look at our contacts)?
What seems to be wrong in Gnome shell is that it adds a lot of clicks in order to get something done
i.e. The typical joe user wants to start a game:
In current gnome clicks Applications navigates to Games and clicks to the game
In future Gnome clicks Activities (cant find it in the app section) clicks more navigates to games clicks to the game (or drags it to the Workspace)
you get my point
Also (and most important)
KILL the fugly tango icons
think beauty ie Oxygen in KDE, MAC OS X,Hell even vista has better icons
I have to agree with foo. In practice, the computing world is very application-centric, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t gradually transition away from such a model. The very first desktop environment, on the Xerox Alto, did not expose the concept of ‘application’ at all to the user. It was Apple that first popularized this (inhumane, in my opinion) conceptual model. Luckily, we are slowly moving in the right direction. Anyone who doesn’t think that this is possible should read Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface, or watch Aza Raskin’s talk, “Away with Application” (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6856727143023456694).
In terms of your great mock-up, it could easily be redesigned to emphasize all the information that the user actually cares about (documents, messages, downloads, songs, etc.), while de-emphasizing (or totally hiding) the applications.
I strongly disagree with AB about icons - while I’ll agree that the Mac OS X icons are beautiful, I really prefer Tango over Oxygen and Vista’s theme…