Life

Unity vs gnome-shell : the small things - status tray 

gnome-shell status tray is an interesting implementation , written in js. Consequently, easy to learn, write for, and extend. What does bother me here, is the focus steal.

When a user click on a status tray icon and moves the cursor down diagonally, focus will switch to next nearest tray icon. This is rather annoying, and more so due to the space between the menu and the icon.

A bug has been filled for this ( gtk menu grab ? ), which Iam unable to locate.



With Unity, this is not seen as the icons are smaller and consequently user has very minimal chance of switching applet when a user moves the cursor diagonally down. Seems to me a good implementation of UI ( or is this fitt's law ?)

One of the problems when working with touch screen is closing apps in window picker mode. I say,  add a "trash can" to the dock where I can drag and drop applications to close. This would only be visible in window picker mode.

Thoughts?

I have thinking about writing this down for quite a while, my experiences with WeTab running Unity and gnome-shell.


Unity seems a good interface for a netbook ( I have not used this on 396.2mm laptop yet). The chink being, poor Tablet support. On install, I had setup auto-login, and was presented with the desktop and launcher. Opening up an app, and maximizing it hides the launcher, which I found really hard to find again. The scroll bar is something I was unable to find in applications, and Touch gesture has not been implemented yet for scrolling. Otherwise, a good deal.


gnome-shell is one the best interface I have seen ( I have limited exposure to KDE ) , when it comes to touchscreen devices. The toggle buttons are huge and easy target to access. The application switch is trivial, as "Activies" is always visible. Switching workspace is easy, not that it is not completely hidden off during "Window Picker mode. The notification is one thing, which I easily miss out on and consequently every action which needs my attention. I would be really happy, if I could show/hide notification from system menu's notification toggle switch.


The good about both, Tiling and "auto-maximization" of Windows works good. We could try working with a Tiling window manager on Tablet, with multiple desktop. What we would need is Thumb keybord, or a keyboard which can stick to one corner assuming we use a single hand to type.


The bad about both, we need bigger fonts and target area. X still lacks a sound multi-touch foundation in most distribution. Scrolling is still a bit painful on touch devices, without gestures such as two finger scroll. Will everyone have a multitouch device ?  gnome-settings-daemon xrandr plugin should also probably rotate the Touchscreen input.



reference:
https://desktopsummit.org/program/sessions/towards-multitouch-gnome-shell
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design
http://unity.ubuntu.com/projects/
http://who-t.blogspot.com/2011/12/multitouch-patches-posted.html
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Multitouch
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652247
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659498

You can pick any colour for your car,  as long as it is black.  So says,  mad over donuts. 

  I tend to like plain donuts,  and one thing which is which comes out of kitchen is a plain freshly prepared hot crunchy donut. The one thing which mad over donut refuses to sell is a freshly prepared hot crunchy plain donut. For some reason whatever else is being sold on,  tastes stale to me.

Speaking over there hot line does help much,  except for the usual corporate rant of standardization and the inability for the customer to choose.

   This sucks,  and leaves a terrible bitter bad taste in my mouth for not so mad over donuts.

 

I am heading to fudcon this year, and hopefully will present a talk to elp people starting to working with open source, specifically GNOME. 

Do vote for me, here - http://fudcon.in/sessions/contributing-opensource

gnome-power-manager has been rewritten for GNOME 3.2, and is now merged into gnome-settings-daemon as a plugin and this manages policy. The power management is done by UPower for most parts, except backlight.This is managed at Session level by g-s-d via power plugin using XRandR or plain old sysfs depending upon driver support.


To manages screen brightness settings, one would do so via dbus, such as shown below 


Now the question being, why bother at all with this aspect. On a tablet, this settings needs to be digged out and non-trivial to access. With gnome-shell-extension brightness ( http://people.redhat.com/rkhadgar/personal/gnome3-tablet/brightness.tar.xz ), you can manage the brightness from your desktop. This requires g-s-d to be patched to support "Changed" signal ( https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=658493 ).


On a side note, devs at gnome-shell are very helpful and felt good talking to them, along with rhughsie.



ToDO

• display brightness symbolic icon needs different levels, and one for auto setting.
• Ambient Light Sensor support on linux seems spotty, and needs to be fixed.