On 06/17/2011 06:21 PM, Adam Williamson wrote: > On Fri, 2011-06-17 at 11:14 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote: >> On 06/17/2011 10:56 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote: >>> Adam Williamson wrote: >>>> 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. >> >> Rest assured, it is not ... esp. on cheap trackpads on cheap laptops. >> >> With Gnome3 you 1stly have to tick on "Applications" (located left top >> on the screen) > > It's a hot spot, and there's a keyboard short cut (as there was before, > so no change there). I never used this shortcut, because there wasn't any need to do so. Navigating with the mouse was sufficient. [BTW: Gnome once had "underlined chars" for the short-cuts - Where have they gone to?] >> , then hit this tiny scroll bar located ca. 1 in/2cm left >> of the right screen (not an easy task - Requires travelling almost the >> whole screen), then to navigate down several pages to find the >> applications your are looking for. > > If you're not going to use keyboard search, you can use the categories, As already having been discussed elsewhere, categories are of limited use, as well are the "mere icon names". > You can also of course use wheel scroll, or the trackpad > equivalent. My netbook doesn't have any such device - Just a simple touchpad and 2 buttons. No mouse, no wheel, no fancy buttons. >> When doing so, you often you are >> getting lost in non-self explanatory icons, with cryptic icon-names >> without tool tips, i.e you are not finding the app you are looking for. > > None of these icons or names have been changed; it's still just an XDG > desktop menu spec implementation, so it uses the icons and names > specified in the /usr/share/applications/*.desktop files, as did GNOME 2 > and as do KDE, Xfce and LXDE. They had tooltips, they had/have menus, they had popups. Now users are lost without explanation, without "help", just with a "big pane". [BTW: on my netbook (1024x600 pixel) the last row of the big pane is unselectable (shaded gray)] >>>> The Giant Grid O' Icons is navigable with a much higher success rate. >> I disagree - It's one of the aspects I am blaming Gnome 3 for to be >> lacking of SW ergonomy. >> >> A "simple application pane" is suitable for "kiosk-style" (smartphone) >> installations with only a very small set of apps installed, but is >> unsuitable for a "multipurpose desktop" with 100s or 1000s of apps >> installed (such as home installations or developers' installations). > > Hence the use of categories. Again, this is only useful if extended package explanation texts (such as tooltips) are available, because the package/icon names often are meaningless. In Gnome 3's current layout, a user doesn't have anyother choice but to try each application. > A single scrollable list of 24-pixel high > entries for every app on the system wouldn't be very useful either - > that's why the 'start menu' has categories, and the Shell has the same > categories. But you don't lose your category if you move your mouse to > the wrong place on the screen, as you did with the nested menus... I didn't mean to say Gnome 2 was perfect (it definitely wasn't), but Gnome 3 ... some consider it to be "revolutionary", others consider it childish and silly or at least to be immature. Openly said, though it shares much of the mindset of Gnome 3 and is similarly buggy, and though I regret of not being able to avoid saying so, I feel much more comfortable with "the other linux"'s new DE on my netbook. Ralf -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
