I agree. I really like a lot of things Apple does to improve usability and the quality of the user experience. The dock is not one of them.

Ubuntu should be like Toyota: pillage the best ideas, parts, and features from its competitors and scrap the rest. Improve on those stolen ideas. Toss in a few new innovations. Release.

I'm honestly not particularly happy with any of the dock/taskbar/whatever solutions in any OS, whether it be Mac, Linux, or Windows. I set the taskbar or dock to auto-hide and generally either alt-tab or 'expose' to the window I need. While we obviously couldn't implement it into Heron, we should start thinking of what a true step forward would be in this regard (honestly, how long has the taskbar been around now?!). I think the way forward would be to in some way eliminate the paradigm of taskbar or dock items representing open windows and instead work with a unified system in which it is always the windows themselves that you are selecting. This could mean perhaps that visible windows do not appear in the taskbar, and that minimized windows are shown in the taskbar as live images of the window with overlayed text identifying it (this is pretty similar to minimized windows in Mac's dock). With intelligent implementation of multiple desktop spaces and 'expose' the need for a traditional taskbar diminishes.

'buttons' in the desktop manager should be for launching applications or other such actions. Active windows should be represented as exactly that: windows, even if in miniature form in a taskbar/dock or in a tiled form (expose).

Anyways, just my 2 cents...
-Sumit

Webmaster, Jhnet.co.uk wrote:
Docks are a problem (though the rest seems alright)
1) None of the docks out there work properly without compositing
2) None seem to be stable
3) They are not actually as good as a task bar (in many people's opinion)
4) The implementations that I have seen do not work as well as apples dock (which is only barley functional enough to be usable).
5) They take up way to much screen space for the functionality they offer (e.g. if you run several document windows you have a screen full of open office icons but no way to differentiate between them).
So from these points I think docks would not be a good way to go (but if there is space I definitely thing they should be included, after all they are popular amongst some people, especially Mac refugees.

I do think the rest of your suggestions were quite valid though, good ideas (at least worth including over some of the themes that come included with Ubuntu).

Jonathan

On 06/02/2008, sylvain marc <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Good, i think i could be here (i hope).

The recent wallpaper "kuti heron" is a verry good idea...
(black for ubuntustudio / brown for ubuntu / bleue for kubuntu);
with the 3D effect (and 3D icones) by default when the PC could,
with cairo-dock & with ubuntu tweak...
& with a theme like murrina-leopardish modified or orange-linstablacplastic...
...i think it will be verry good.


What do you think about it ?

Sam7

2008/2/5, Kenneth Wimer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Hi all,

We are slightly overdue for the next meeting. I suggest this Friday at 20:00
UTC. Is this too soon for anyone? Too early/late? Ideas?

Items for discussion are:

1) recent wallpaper submissions, testing by inclusion in the next build, etc.

2) 2D icons: currently underway, I am leaning towards using the simple 2D
version for several reasons. Let's discuss this and find a way to move
forward.

3) Testing the clear looks theme, adding to next build.

...more to come


--
Kenneth

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