On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 3:59 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-06-14 at 01:19 +0200, Henrik Wejdmark wrote:
>
>> My impression is that GNOME3 is trying to compete with Android and FrontRow,
>> but have forgotten all of us who still uses desktops/laptops. We don't have
>> touch screens yet....
>
> This is a common misapprehension, but it's not true. The reason for the
> large icon grid is actually that the developers did real world user
> research (yes, really!) and found that many people had significant
> trouble navigating the typical Windows / GNOME 2 nested menu system full
> of wide-but-short entries. They would lose levels in the nesting by
> moving the mouse a bit wrong. They would launch the wrong thing because
> the target area was too short. This was especially pronounced with poor
> pointing devices - particularly cheap trackpads on cheap laptops.
Hm, but then this problem was not at all solved. Every Important
Application(tm) (i.e. Firefox, LibreOffice, Empathy) uses the same
menu widgets, and uses nested menus. A real solution would
necessarily involve changes to the GTK menu widget (and, well, perhaps
actually using the GTK widget set for gnome-shell).
Currently, when I open the giant application grid, I get oversized
meaningless pictures (yes, oversized - to even see the grid I had to
click on the "Applications" label, which is much smaller than the
icons), accompanied with some text in tiny font that is impossible to
read at a glance, but apparently still too large to fit text on
screen, resulting in "Wireshark Network An...".
And as for the keyboard search:
* The grid contains two "Aktualizace softwaru" ("Software Update{,s}"
in English) icons, and search returns one of them perhaps 80% of the
time, and the other in 20%. The old menu actually allowed developing
some muscle memory to reach a specific item, the search doesn't.
* Try typing "bittorrent": you'll get an image that I can best
describe as one of the devices used to set off explosions in comic
books, with "Transmission" written under it. Why should the user feel
that they want to start _that_ program?
Mirek
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