Hi all,
This is my first post on this mailing list. More than a year I'm subscribed
and receivingposts but never sent anything because I believe that people should
write something onlywhen they have some, more or less, valuable thoughts. For
the purpose of this shortintroduction, I'm software developer learning about
open source in my spare time becauseI really like this business model and
believe it is superior than others.
Newest release of GNOME I have been waiting for a long time caused different
emotionsto me. I realize that GNOME would like to enter into Netbook/Tablet
market segment becausethis is very lucrative one, but to be fair to the
"legacy" users and for the purpose of betterfuture GNOME development, I believe
that user experience might be better.
Here I identified some issues I found while I was using GNOME3:
1. I believe that Ubuntu Unity did a good job introducing Document-oriented
environment, sameas we could see in Apple Mac OS X. GNOME3 pretty much wastes
space in this area.
2. Default window theme has very thick Title bar, again wasting screen space.
This issue becomeseven more important if we want to run GNOME3 on tablets.
3. Whole user experience is (as it looks to me) designed for touch-screens.
Normal desktop/laptopusers find this design less friendly than old one.
Following issue is not directly related to GNOME3, but just my idea I would
like to see implementedand believe software developers and professional users
would find it very useful. While I'm not'reinventing the wheel' I still believe
it is new idea.
Proposal. I have been using keyboard-oriented computers for almost 20 years.
During this time,I believe, keyboards are segment where we saw very little
innovation. 101-keys US keyboard is astandard we could see everywhere with very
small differences. Win keys, AltGr and droppingnumerical keyboard are very few
modifications of this old standard. I believe that this fact is aconsequence of
one very mature well-designed input device. I would say I wish I could onlyuse
a keyboard as my computer input device.
For all this time we have old command prompt text interface as the fastest way
how software developercould "communicate" with computer. We are also living in
graphic-oriented displays and suchtechnology is very useful so we cannot depend
on text interface any more. However, mouse as aninput device is not very fast
tool. We have to move hands, to concentrate to mouse-pointer, etc.
My idea is whether we could develop one "command prompt"-oriented window where
we could communicate with all our applications? I know, you will tell me, about
xterm, and other similaremulators, but this emulator allows us just to use
bash,csh and other shells, not to communicatewith other applications.
I propose some application where we could type commands like "\calc\open
.\myfile" for openingfile in calc or "\gimp\line x1 y1 x2 y2" for drawing line
in gimp, for example, and do all things weare doing currently with shortcuts or
clicking to icons or to menu items. I realize that each applicationhas to have
support for this feature, but for all of us using computers daily this way of
interactionwould make mouse and other pointer devices completely useless and
all communication could bedone much faster from keyboard only. Text commands
are simple, fast, and very comprehensiveway for doing anything and graphic
environment could provide us picture/video and all othertools we don't have in
plain-text environment.
As a consequence all windows and applications could be menu/icon/dialog-free so
we could havemore space for a real job need to be done when we use them.
And my final thought is related to Google Chromebook. We could see that Google
is trying to redefinekeyboard making it simpler and more useful than it is
currently. I think that such idea is great. Lotof "garbage" computer history
collected all these years and somebody has to "clean" it a little bit.Win keys
and some of ASCII characters today doesn't have any sense. Ctrl and Alt are
more thanenough for giving users more options for typing.
That is all from me, so far. If you like my ideas we could start working on it,
and I will start proposingmore things, if you don't I will be passive observer
and in future contributor to other well-establishedGNOME projects.
Uros Nedic, MScBelgrade, Serbia
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