Full screen experience.

[Madspyman]

OK, start bars, top panels, and global menus are great and all but why isn't anyone trying to plan an OS based on the full screen experience? I can usually customize for it pretty well, but it'd be a nice thing to have by default. I think it'd be good marketing for an OS to be able to advertise the full screen experience. What does everyone else think?

[chessnerd]

Well, vanilla Openbox is "full screen" in that you don't have any panels or global menus or anything like that. To open a program you right click the desktop.

I often maximize my applications, so I need a panel of some sort to let me open and switch between applications unless some other method was devised to open them.

Actually, I did have an idea a while ago for an OS that emphasized hotkeys. Things like Super-B would open the web browser, Super-W would open the word processor, and Super-E would open the email client. Then, there would be Super-Z which would pop up all the hotkeys at the bottom of the screen (similar to the iPhone keyboard) and allow you to edit them. The Super key by itself would open a small dialog box that, when you began typing in it, would bring up a list of all applications that contained that combination of letters in the name and the user could click on or scroll to the one they wanted. Then, Alt-Tab would be used to switch between applications, or Super-Alt-Tab would bring up a list of running applications that the user could choose from.

This could make for an interesting experience if everything was done in full screen. I'm thinking something like a full screen browser that had only an auto-hide URL-bar so it would get out of your way. In fact, this could be done with all applications by making the chrome auto-hide. It would be an OS GUI that emphasized what the user was doing and not what application they were doing it with.

Kinda went off topic there, but I think I brought it back around. Was that kind of what you were thinking?