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