Killing Mode Switch
As Allan already mentioned in one of his useful summaries, I’ve been pondering how how to improve the layout of the application picker in shell’s overview. While the mockup he showed does address the small click target problem, it still felt out of place with relation to the dash. I tried to apply different lipstick on it, but there was something inherently wrong with the layout and the overview lost its clean, “no boxes” feel.
The reason for the windows/applications toggle was easy extensibility. We thought of using shell to access people/contacts in the same way as we access applications. We thought to present documents in a better way without exposing the filesystem here as well. We thought the orthogonal arrangement ala Sony’s XMB would be fun on touch devices. Over time, I have come to the conclusion that extending the scope of shell might do more harm than good. I’ve never been a fan of all-in-one solutions ala iTunes.
Looking up people in a well designed contacts app might be an extra step to go through, but it won’t force us to kludge in some mode switching. We don’t yet have answers to finding & reminding, so I’m not stepping onto the thin ice just yet.
After some frobbing in Inkscape and Blender, I came out with a streamlined layout the overview, using a toggle button on the dash to expose ‘all apps’ for the less commonly used ones:
There are currently a couple of benefits to this approach — removing an item (favourite) from the dash is a matter of dropping it back to the ‘all apps’ pool without the need to show a temporary delete icon. We’re only removing it from the dash, not really uninstalling or deleting it. The ‘…’ button (“show me more…”) lives in the context of application launchers rather than arbitrarily floating in space.
You probably noticed the app picker here uses a pager instead of a scrolled view. Obviously this would require the apps to not be auto sorted and we would have to give the user the ability to sort the list. That way the pages would aid us better when finding a less frequently used app (“I know it’s down here among X and Y”).
How the transitions feel adds to the experience. I was aiming to have the launchers behave like a swarm when you toggle the button on and off. Sadly Blender trunk seems to misbehave with regard to the follow path constraint, so I have to punt that for now.
I regret we didn’t have time to go through this iteration before the 3.0 release, but I think the change is worth the pain.
June 16th, 2011 at 2:08 am
hello,
2 points:
why is that magic button (ellipse or how do you call it) at the bottom? the top of the dash seems to me more easily accessible.
and why do you hide all the desktops from a user in the windows overview? I personally would much appreciate, if the workspaces column were visible completely (without a painful mice slide to the other side of screen).
June 16th, 2011 at 2:29 am
I personally would much appreciate, if the workspaces column were visible completely (without a painful mice slide to the other side of screen).
Likewise – having to move the mouse to the edge to see what’s on the other desktops is definitely a step backwards for me. In Gnome 2.x I’ve got that info available at a glance through a panel applet – in 3.x I have to bring up the Activities view (fine, I can live with that), and then roll the mouse over to the far side of the screen to bring that sidebar into view. It’s really not ideal..
June 16th, 2011 at 2:50 am
Mixed feelsings. I had grand visions of future additions to the “Windows, Applications” sequence…”People” being one of them yes…but also “Weather”, “Notes”, “System Monitor”, etc. Each accessed directly from the desktop with a shortcut e.g. winkey+f1-12
Regardless, I like your mockup…except for the “…” being at the bottom. That means the target would move depending on the number of apps running in the dash.
June 16th, 2011 at 3:51 am
I will like this design, awesome thought.
>>> the �…� being at the bottom.
I think that is because the most frequent use apps are stay at the dash already, so people rarely touch the [...]that those apps.
but anyway, if this will be implemented, the [...] will be re-order-able I hope.
June 16th, 2011 at 6:23 am
How about a hotspot in top left that opens up the panel or launcher or favourite bar, whatever it’s called, and shows all applications, and then a windows/workspaces hotspot in the bottom left that shows all the windows where the applications were and the workspaces where the favourite bar was.
June 16th, 2011 at 7:15 am
How about having the toggle button somewhere on the top?
June 16th, 2011 at 10:06 am
Along the lines of those comments about having the workspace switcher show all of the workspaces in entirety upon hitting the overview… I think that’s a little much. The whole point of keeping it where it is is to give a visual cue but without distracting the user. I think we’d be sacrificing a lot more to shove all the workspaces in someone’s face when they’re not planning to look at it half of the time. There are a multitude of good reasons to go into the Activities view.
I’m also a tiny bit concerned about putting the three dots on the bottom, and with how big the button is. I mean, I know it’s trying to look and feel consistent with the other applications, and that may be the appropriate place to put it (the dash), but it feels like it’s drawing more attention than necessary. Of course, it should be discoverable as well, so that’s a compromise- the ‘dot dot dot’ is SOMEWHAT clear about what the button does, but I don’t expect most users to instantly grasp that before seeing this video.
There are already a few extensions that are using this ‘activities, windows, etc.’ space. Maybe having a few options isn’t so bad, but this is the beginning- we have room to experiment.
I’m glad that you’re willing to try to look at this problem differently, sorry I don’t have any concrete suggestions for a better implementation at the moment. I’m also really wary of completely removing the ability to look through categories. Is this a necessary tradeoff? I’m not trying to sound like a whining Nancy, but that’s one of those big features we have over the other desktop systems, which is hard to ignore after you’ve used it.
I think it’s more likely than not that if someone’s looking through the extra applications they will be looking for something they’re not certain of, and no categories may make it impossible to find. Of course, maybe those type of programs should be in System Settings rather than relied upon through an application category alone.
Thanks for thinking hard about this. Keep thinking hard and being open with what you’ve got- it’s a huge help to me, personally, to know what’s happening on some accessible level.
June 16th, 2011 at 10:30 am
It looks great, but missing Applications categories is big no no in my book. Is there any way to reinvent them in the new way you propose?
Thanks for your work!
June 16th, 2011 at 10:38 am
I rather like this change but I, too, think the “all apps” button should be at the top. It may be used less BUT when I actually want something from “all apps” I don’t want to move my mouse all the way to the top left of the screen and then back down to the bottom just to hit that. Plus, I’m thinking maybe it could have a more descriptive icon. The “…” doesn’t seem like it would be immediately obvious to a new user and it feels a bit “cheap” (sorry), like it’s an unfinished placeholder.
Anyway, this is a much, much better idea then the previous mockups I saw where it felt like the Activities view was becoming increasing busy with all the additional boxes, lines, buttons, etc…
In regard to the issue of workspace visibility, I much prefer it how it is. I use multiple workspaces only sparingly but have many windows per workspace. I’d rather not have the workspace list clutter up the windows overview unless I call upon it.
June 16th, 2011 at 10:41 am
@ PÄ“teris, thanks for mentioning that! I, too, am rather saddened by the potential removal of the categories listing.
June 16th, 2011 at 11:21 am
and what about using categories similar to that used in iphone?
June 16th, 2011 at 12:04 pm
It’s funny that I have been thinking about proposing exactly that. I even had a sketch/mockup already: https://docs.google.com/drawings/pub?id=16cUxrVX7W9c3645B83vF5m4PoMiV6aFE6dgFJYRs4WM&w=1220&h=763
So, – after the initial “Hey, that’s MY idea!” reaction
– I am very happy that Gnome Shell may be getting this that layout.
I would like to propose another “enhancement”: removing the Dash from the Application Picker view. It is wasting space and all the app icons in it are duplicated in the App Picker. I know that the presence of the Dash is suposed to hint at the hability to drag icons from the App Picker to the Dash in order to make them Favorites, but I think that is of little importance:
- one can also drag icons from the App Picker to the Workspace sidebar to open the app in a specific Workspace, and there is no “hint”;
- in the past, the icons in the App Picker were identical (in size and label) to those in the Dash, so that would help the “hint”, but that is not true anymore.
I disagree with comments saying that the “all apps” button should be on the top. Long mouse movement is no excuse: by definition, the most frequently used apps are the most frequently used, so, placing these on top of the button to access all other apps reduce the overal mouse movement. Also, since we read from up to down, placing the “…” button in the bottom is the most logical choice.
June 16th, 2011 at 12:21 pm
> “The â€?…â€? doesn’t seem like it would be immediately obvious to a new user and it feels a bit â€?cheapâ€? (sorry), like it’s an unfinished placeholder.”
I have the exact same feeling everytime I see the trash can that appears so I can remove items from the dash.
It is too big, it feels flat and drawn quickly, compared to the rest of the overview which is pure gorgeous.
About the mockup from this article, wow, I can’t wait to try it out in Gnome 3.2.
One thing that might appease those who dread the removal of categories (I seldom use them myself) would be to let the user rearrange his applications, perhaps even creating “drawers” (for lack of a better word) to group them, like in iOS?
June 16th, 2011 at 12:40 pm
Are there any plans to add management of extensions and theme natively in gnome-shell?
That was one thought that struck my mind, since there is an extension showing installed themes in an additional tab.
Also, I kinda like the idea of showing frequently used documents (? la Zeitgeist) in gnome-shell.
By the way, the swarm looks awsome!
June 16th, 2011 at 2:52 pm
I think I like this change! It takes away a lot of the “oddness” of the current design and makes the whole interaction a lot simpler and streamlined.
One thing to consider is that the application picker will now become a moving target. Moving it to the top instead would help (but on the other hand wouldn’t give you the nice feeling of continuation from the favourites app list). Damn, making hard choices is hard.
June 16th, 2011 at 2:59 pm
I like this change! For four reasons:
(1) Avoids the confusing “trash icon” usage for removing apps from the favourites bar.
(2) Much easier to hit than the “Applications” button due to Fitt’s law
(3) Avoids the lets-add-tabs-for-features tendency that’s growing for the overview mode, especially with the Finding and Reminding mockups.
(4) It’s intuitive and looks great!
June 16th, 2011 at 4:49 pm
Hi Jimmac,
This is certainly a welcomed change!
The old mode switch, besides its font rendering horribly in the overview, also had a small hit area, making it a difficult target. And the naming used was not clear enough: taking into account GNOME 3′s goals, the distinction between ‘Windows’ and ‘Applications’ could potentially be a source of confusion for end users.
This new approach effectively solves this, but I’m still not totally convinced. I don’t think the button is that clear regarding its function – one could think some Dash favorites were hidden and that clicking in the button would expand it. Right now, I think it would be too much of a “hit-and-discover” feature, and not one that would feel as instinctive as the Shell generally feels (although the discoverability is high, and the user would certainly be pushed to that button).
About the transition, I agree with you, with adds to the experience and it’s an invaluable addition. With it and the visuals a bit more refined, I think the user would totally understand what’s the happening there.
Oh, on an unrelated note, please change your blog’s code so that the window title becomes the post’s title, instead of the blog’s name. Repetition is clumsy clumsy.
June 16th, 2011 at 5:07 pm
I like this new design for many reasons, but nobody has mentioned the most important one to me: getting rid of “Windows” and “Applications” buttons not only removes clutter, but also makes the search view much more clear and understandable… plus opens up some very interesting possibilities. Let me explain what I’m thinking a bit further.
When typing something in the “Search your computer” box, applications and windows that match the text appear, but also devices and places (not sure if also files, but you get the point: different kind of things appear). Every group of items is under a headline (“Applications, “Devices & Places”, etc) . Having the Windows and Application buttons right above these results, even with the buttons disabled, looked a bit confusing. But with this new design, it would look much clearear. Fantastic!
Moreover (here comes the “opens up some interesting possibilities” part), I think it’d be posible to add more kinds of results to the search and somehow solve the “problem” of not wanting to add a “Contact” tab to the dash to avoid clutter (a decision I totally share). It’d be possible to show contacts as another category in the search results, under its own headline. Then when clicking on a contact, the new contacts app would open revealing all the contact’s info (you could even add some right-click functionality, but maybe that’s too complicated and begins to look like duplicating the contacts app). This way a “Contacts” tab isn’t needed to offer the functionality inside the dash. Of course there won’t be a list of contacts accesible from the dash, but it doesn’t matter: if you just want to look at all your contacts, you just open the contacts app. You can use the dash only to search for a specific contact (which I think it’s what most people want to do most of the time).
This concept could also apply to files. Once again, you use the dash only to search for specific files; if you want to navigate though all of them, you open Nautilus. As I said, I’m not sure if file search is already built into the dash or not, sorry if it’s already there or there are plans to do it.
I think this is a good compromise between useful built-in functionality and stand-alone apps. The search box in the dash would be much more useful this way and even extensible with plugins. There could be for example a whole “Internet search” category in the search results, driven by search engines plugins like the ones in the web browser, rather than showing only a couple of “Google” and “Wikipedia” buttons.
Maybe you already thought about all this, I don’t know. I don’t have time to follow your work directly so I read your blogs as often as I can. Sorry if I made too much noise, just trying to help. Totally love what you guys are doing with GNOME 3. Big thanks from an enthusiastic GNOME user.
June 16th, 2011 at 5:11 pm
I forgot to say I agree with PÄ“teris though, application categories are very useful, especially for new users: when they want to do something, they look at the categories and click on the one which relates to the task they’re trying to achieve. That’s the reason why the old GNOME 2 menu was so intuitive. My mother couldn’t live without categories!
June 16th, 2011 at 5:39 pm
Hey guys, thanks for the useful feedback. I will not respond to everything raised, but the idea of a more fine grained grouping for launchers isn’t completely appalling to me. The problem with current categories is that no matter how well we think we can structure things, it is a structure forced upon the user so it just becomes another way to paginate through a list. Was Miro in Internet or Sound & Video?
What would be much more useful from where I look at it from is if we allowed the user to somehow group items together him/herself. But I still consider the pagination in itself (ala ipad) a better way to deal with less used apps than fixed grouping and scrolled list.
June 16th, 2011 at 9:00 pm
I think this is a wonderful change, and the title sums it up pretty well: mode switches complicate things that should be much simpler.
I also have a bug filed against the shell that this pretty much solves. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=650535
June 17th, 2011 at 4:45 am
Is your blog supposes to supply feedback upon message sent?
I tried posting several times and it has yet to be posted.
June 17th, 2011 at 2:20 pm
Some tentative thought on finding and reminding: recently used things are already there: windows overview shows running application / opened documents. So what about adding more recently used things to the windows overview? Just small thumbnails at the bottom of the screen and scrolling option for more. Or something similar.
June 17th, 2011 at 2:50 pm
That looks really promising!
However, there is just one problem I have with Gnome Shell which is not solved by your mockup:
If an application is already running, its icon is highlighted not only in the dock, but also in the Applications tab.
Clicking a highlighted icon in the applications tab only brings up the existing window.
However, as jumping to an existing instance is already offered by the dock, you always want to start a NEW instance when going to the applications tab.
June 17th, 2011 at 4:46 pm
As oOarthurOo said: Instead of having a button just use the hot corner on the lower right to bring up the application view. Feels a lot smoother than taking away concentration to hit the applications button…
June 18th, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Looking from my side as keyboard user, who always hits Windows, starts typing, hits enter. I couldn’t care less if half of interface gets removed. With hot corner as first (damn thing is really annoying).
But, as one who is mostly involved in getting companies on linux (and gs). Removing application categories is real hand brake for me. I’m mostly involved with new users who see linux for the first time and to make matters worse, they only use that at work. At home they’re back to Windows.
” The problem with current categories is that no matter how well we think we can structure things, it is a structure forced upon the user so it just becomes another way to paginate through a list. Was Miro in Internet or Sound & Video?”
At least there were two possible places where it could be found by test’n'try for new user. Now you slap this new user who doesn’t have a clue what Miro is (yes, application names are always so wonderfully expressive) into mass of icons which he doesn’t know or recognize. He just knows he is looking something about video on internet. In 3.0, I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised since every user found all he wanted to use.
This is the same wtf as I had when i saw iPad. whole bunch of launchers which didn’t mean anything to me, so I simply proclaimed it as unintuitive piece of shit. I hate that interface on phone, I hate it on pads, I will hate it on computer. The only platform where I can understand why it is like that is phone as it has serious screen estate problem.
If this gets in my best hope is to either hope someone will write extension which will provide back what is lost or search for something else than shell. But what I’d absolutely refuse is to become 100% involved with every user just to find some piece of software.
Beside the fact spatial memory is bogus. If I install 3 new softwares one under A, one under H and one under M, everything has to be relearned. Try it on your phone and see. It is the same kind of bogus as spatial folders, which you know how successful they were.
Much better move would be fixing the application category problem with tagging. Put tags on Miro that it is in Internet and Sound&Video, now you don’t have problem finding it.
Removing is good, but when you start removing sanity all that you’re left with is insanity.
June 18th, 2011 at 6:25 pm
Rather than tagging apps, what I’d do would be to make the search look at the category and descriptions of the applications. This way, users can type the kind of task they want to do in the search box of the shell and they’ll obtain pretty accurate results. No need for them to navigate through tags or categories, no need to put more stuff into the UI to do so and no need to repack or modify applications in any way in order to add tags.
What do you design guys think about this? Sounds good to me.
June 18th, 2011 at 8:31 pm
“Rather than tagging apps, what I’d do would be to make the search look at the category and descriptions of the applications.”
Obviously you only deal with English language. Translations into our language are mostly crap (not translators fault, gnome is in some cases better translated than Windows, most of it comes from badly designed computer terms in vocabulary). Beside the fact that a lot of out of distro software doesn’t even have translation of description into our language.
Add all this and search only makes everything even harder on user who is not using linux by choice and heart. If someone doesn’t want to use it, he will look for every angle to discredit it, having sensible groups was one of my easiest points on ease of replacing Windows as every single user we tested found most by instinct and not one ever used search. Each user always used groups.
Just imagine, if you don’t know OS and which software is there. How do you know what to use? If half is in your language, half in english, where one half of software provides sensible information while other half simply uses default app name. Especially if your computer knowledge lacks even on OS you use regularly? Just what do you enter in search?
Even if you take away new users, unless you plan to translate all descriptions into all languages, how will this search work for non-English?
Why not simply offer both grouped and ungrouped, then let user choose which one he will use. in tweak cp.
June 20th, 2011 at 10:54 pm
Hi
You should probably talk to the GSoC people working on stuff for the shell, as this new idea kills stuff like this:
http://blog.kitallis.in/2011/06/gsoc-1.html
right?
June 21st, 2011 at 9:52 am
I like it, bu also have a proposal
! Extend the dock instead of shooting out icons !
Remember the old apple side docks?
http://images.appleinsider.com/leopard-preview-mail-12.png
How about having a wider dock hidden under the current dock. Clicking the “more apps”-icon slides out the hidden dock from left to right. This could make it feel like it all was part of the dock.
/Michael
July 18th, 2011 at 3:10 pm
Michael, yes that is also one of the ideas we looked into and will probably revisit for this.
July 21st, 2011 at 6:28 pm
anonym, it’s not this that kills the F&R stuff in the shell. We might have that stuff as a first workspace in terms of layout.
What does kill it, however is the amount of “stuff” that we tend to accumulate. After some time I believe F&R belongs to the applications themselves, rather than the shell replicating the scope filtering inside one screen.
August 4th, 2011 at 12:35 pm
Hello, i post this in gnome-shell-list
What you thinking about that :
Thanks a lot
J?©r?´me
—————————————————————————-
Hello,
to help the team design, I worked on a mock up. I hope I post in right place?
The purpose of my proposal is to replace the categories on the right, with icons on top of icons of programs.
Here is a link to the mockup: http://www.informalibre.fr/shell/gnome-shell-applications.png
Further, I ask if it is really necessary to bring up the favorite programs from the list of applications which is filtered through the categories?
Thank you in advance
I wait your comments
J?©r?´me Perret
(Translated from the French translation via google)
September 16th, 2011 at 9:26 pm
hope to see this relayout in the next release.
it can really clean the shell overview.
but I’m really against the pager, I’m with the scrollbar.
it’s not consistent with the rest of the environment (shell and applications).
categories work better as they are than a pager.
personally I think that apps should be just ordered alphabetically.
maybe they should be grouped in categories displayed in the same style as a search result into the shell.
I hope I can submit a decent mock-up.
good job! happy release!
(even if I have a little more radical (conservative!) point of view..)
September 17th, 2011 at 12:24 pm
I filed a new bug, since it doesn’t involve a pager.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659309
check it out,
cheers
October 14th, 2011 at 10:39 pm
It looks really good is there any code written yet? any git repository to try it out o look for bugs?
December 10th, 2011 at 7:54 pm
Integrating the dock extension with Gnome Shell(as suggested by Linus Torvalds), will take care of the favourite application list and will free up the left side of the dash. “Applications” and “Windows” can then be moved from the top to the left(ie. take the place of current favourite application’s icons).