Actually.. Regarding this if I may add a little peice of thought to the discussion. The dock not the most useful thing ever and it's just one more option in a line of things that all do mostly the same thing. The solution may lie in another thing that bugs me. I have never liked the menu bar. Neither in GNUStep nor Étoilé (and OS X either of course). It has always bugged me having to switch to the application to get to the menus. I would much more like having access to all the menus. The idea I had was to have all the application in a list at the top and clicking each give you the menu for that application. So instead of the bar at the top reading like: *RSS Reader Info Edit Feeds*
it would read: *RSS Reader | Vindaloo | Typewriter | Calc* That would give you quick access to menus and also serve as an application switcher of some sort. Heck. It would even give you the option of marking some software marked as favourites and give you the menus of the software even when not running. Might not work in reality and needs work but it just flyed through my head when I was reading this mail. On 7/29/07, David Chisnall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 29 Jul 2007, at 23:46, Yen-Ju Chen wrote: > > > I would like to have a conclusion regarding the dock. > > Dock serves many purposes, but also many controversies. > > > > First, it is a window switcher, which can be replace by AZSwitch. > > Based on screenshots of OS X 10.5, > > it is application switcher. In another word, > > all the window of the same application has to > > stay in the same desktop. > > I tend to use Exposé pretty exclusively for switching windows, so I > don't have a problem with this. I hide applications all the time > though, and the dock is the easiest way of unhiding them. > > > Second, it is an application launcher. > > I personally don't like this idea. > > The solution is to have a menu shows all recently > > opened applications, say up to 20. > > In that case, users don't need to organize the dock anymore. > > The more frequently used application will be on the upper part > > of the menu. > > Long-term, we're getting rid of applications, so this isn't a > problem. I tend to have the 15 or so apps I use most often running > all the time (launched at boot), and the rest I launch from a simple > command-line-like thing. > > > Third, it is a notifier (unread mail, message from IM, etc). > > If we have a notifier framework and probably a menulet for that, > > we don't need dock, either. > > It's quite nice for non-urgent, non-intrusive, notifications. If I > go away from my computer and come back, I can glance at an > application icon and see if I have mails or IMs waiting. I'd like to > see a good solution for replacing this before I throw it away. > > > Fourth, it provides limited contextual for a few action on > > application > > without make them active first. > > I am not sure it is really usefully except 'empty trash'. > > I'd completely forgotten about that aspect. Shows how often I use it. > > > So my propose is to remove the dock. > > If you want to launch commonly-used applications, > > we add a menu for that on menu bar. > > Then we go from move-click to move-click-drag-release for a common > action. > > > If you want to switch window, use 'Alt-tab'. > > Not ideal if you don't have your hand on the keyboard, or if you are > using a touchscreen. > > > If you want to see whether you have unread mail, > > maybe we can show it with 'Alt-tab' (with some Xwindow trick) > > or have a notifier framework for that. > > I'd rather have some part of the screen for unobtrusive > notifications. I quite like the idea of a scrolling ticker, which is > gradually populated with events (click on one to be taken to the > window that caused it). Not sure how intrusive this would be though. > > David > _______________________________________________ > Etoile-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss > -- Jón Grétar Borgþórsson
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