On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 7:21 PM, William Jon McCann < [email protected]> wrote:
> But speaking of modern desktop systems, I don't know of a single OS > environment > designed in the last, say, 5 years that has a window based taskbar. > Do you? (Docks and live window previews are different.) Vista was > probably the last one ever. Well, Chrome OS <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ57xzo287U> seems likely to have something very similar to a window based taskbar. The tabs are essentially full screen windows, supplemented with either overlaying panels or sidebars, and what were windows are made to be more like desktops, selected from a zoomed out overview. To me, this seems like a pretty enticing evolution of the taskbar, and of window management generally (though "management" is what this tiling largely dispenses with, at least for a small, single-tab screen). And Firefox, which for lots of people is almost an operating environment in itself, has outlined (tentative) plans<http://limi.net/articles/reinventing-tabs-for-the-browser/> to keep its tabbar even as it adds a sidebar-based tab switcher. If anything, Gnome Shell seems distinctive among all available desktop operating environments in doing away with persistent visual representation of unfocused windows and apps, at least by default (litl is like this too, I guess). In Windows and OS X these things are (as far as I can see) always visible, unless auto-hiding is enabled (setting aside any fancy situations with workspaces). From that perspective, the activities view is something like an auto-hiding menu/dock, an approach more familiar from cell phones than desktops. This seems to me a bold move, making unfocused things into fully invisible ones. And it seems very deliberately and thoughtfully intended: > Owen Taylor: Well, the bluntest answer here is that if a window isn't important to what you are doing right now, it's good that you forgot it! As Owen Taylor makes clear, this puts a burden on applications to make use of the available notifications systems to maintain the distinction between active and inactive activities: The larger extension of that is that we want window switching to be about switching what you are doing, and not about polling for changes. There's obviously plenty of work to be done to get all applications on board with that story. My question is how this relates to the web and all the applications there. Given the diversity of apps in the world, especially in the wild west of the web, I'm worried that this sort of integration is an unreasonable expectation. If Gnome's goal is to be as self-contained and integrated as a mobile os, or as litl, then I suppose that would include wrapping or communicating with web services rather than just relaying and arranging web apps. But what about a less ambitious sort of integration, one that allows Gmail and Obscurewebmail to function as units equivalent to Evolution without expecting all three to be equally communicative about their states? >From the web side, Chrome OS is making parallel efforts to enforce a distinction between foreground activities (full tabs) and background ones (IM and music in overlays). The Googlers are working on a notification spec, and maybe in the future everything will talk with everything. But for now I don't think they are relying on this sort of communication (well, nothing is even released yet), and they are keeping the (comfortingly familiar) tabbar. For the record, as much as I prefer the conservative approach of Chrome/Chrome OS right now, I'm really eager to see where Gnome Shell goes. And I'm looking forward to changing my interfacing habits. It's not just the apps that need reprogramming, after all. In any case, I hope these thoughts are useful.
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