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View Full Version : Gnome 3's new approach to application design



CarpKing
February 12th, 2012, 10:57 PM
http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/a-new-approach-to-gnome-application-design/

Should be interesting...

As usual, I like some of their ideas but am not quite sold on others. Maximization by default makes sense for some applications on some systems, and the title bars on maximized apps does currently seem a waste. Epiphany was never going to out-Firefox Firefox, so it's good that they've found a different direction to take it in. I'll certainly give it a try, even if it's unlikely to unseat Firefox. That "Music" app isn't quite so promising, though. I'm all for removing clutter, but the idea of "travelling through the application" to switch between different types of functionality seems like it could get old real fast.

It's times like these when I'm thankful for the ease of software repositories. I can reap the benefits of the Gnome developers' bold experimentation while working around their missteps without too much hassle.

BrokenKingpin
February 13th, 2012, 02:33 AM
In My Opinion, Gnome 3 (and Unity) are getting way too involved with the actual applications. Leave my damn menus and **** alone. Also, if I didn't have an application maximized the last time I had it opened, it means I probably don't want it maximized the next time I open it.

Most of this new **** being introduced by Gnome 3 and Unity just is not needed on Desktop Linux. Or at least make it configurable (and default it to off).

grahammechanical
February 13th, 2012, 03:05 AM
Is there some sort of competition going between Canonical and Gnome as to who can publish their latest ideas first?

Regards.

Copper Bezel
February 13th, 2012, 06:03 AM
In My Opinion, Gnome 3 (and Unity) are getting way too involved with the actual applications. Leave my damn menus and **** alone. Also, if I didn't have an application maximized the last time I had it opened, it means I probably don't want it maximized the next time I open it.

These are revisions to the Gnome HIG, particularly as they apply to in-house applications. These are goals for the Gnome desktop, and Gnome's own apps are going to lead by example. There's no attempt to shoehorn anyone else's applications into this arrangement.

I like a lot of it. I won't necessarily like having to go to the Overview to close a maximized window, but it's Gnome Shell, so I'm going to end up there, anyway (to switch to or launch another app.) I don't like automatic maximizing I can't control, because I know it'll be applied to gedit and Nautilus, which I never maximize even on my tiny netbook screen.

The new toolbars could be very nice. Menubars seem to be dead, and I'm okay with that. Epiphany is very iOS Safari and seems limited, but I'm likely to be using Chrome, anyway, although the way that Epiphany can handle bookmarks as apps is nice. (Chrome did this at one time, but there was some effort involved. Epiphany - and Explorer 9 - make it straightforward, and I appreciate that. But Epiphany still lacks a lot of the things that make me use Chrome, like the built-in PDF viewer, the extension base, including a lovely item for touch scrolling, etc.)

Yeah, I think I can mostly get behind this. I think it's a very efficient and attractive use of screen space, even if it's only for Gnome's own applications. I'm sure there will be little annoyances and workarounds, but I'm used to that.* And really, it's just nice to see some attention put into making applications look and work in a modern way, instead of putting all the focus on the shell.

* For instance, Gnome 3's new handling of application launching makes it very difficult to make use of its new, pretty workspaces. The Dash click makes it difficult to launch a new window in a running application, but even forcing it to launch a new window doesn't always work, because even running the command, say, gedit, from terminal only creates a new document in an existing window. However, I've found that the .desktop files can be modified with --new-window, removing this problem. I expect to see more annoyances like this, but on the whole, I don't expect them to be insurmountable.