Re: [Ayatana] What about the Dash on Oneiric Ocelot ?

[Anthropornis Nordenskjoldi <anthropornis@xxxxxxxxx>]

I strongly support your mockup, or something similar.  At a minimum I'd appreciate the ability to separate out what the system determines is "frequent" and what I explicitly "pin". Moreover, as for "frequent" apps, places, or files, Zeitgeist also seems to have a short memory span (maybe a week?).

Another core feature I would to see in Unity is the fundamental ability to toggle between a desktop/laptop mode, and a tablet/netbook mode. I will never ever use the latter or any touch-oriented features, so I don't need huge icons anywhere in the interface. Really, I don't even need any touch-oriented stuff even loaded into memory at boot, so if this could be akin to recompiling your kernel more than toggling between different things always resident in memory, that'd be great.

Really, if I could just assign every app a short nickname in the Main Menu editor, I don't need to see the Icon and the name, so I'd like to be able to customize the desktop/laptop mode to restore as much screen real estate as possible, by choosing to see either icons, nicknames (not lengthy full names), or both, just as  toolbars in many apps currently do.

(To restore some screen real estate I'm currently using a compact Nautilus drop-down indicator for places and the Cardapio menu for "pinned" apps. Prior to that I'd hacked a static Quicklist to have my pinned apps, with the least possible amount of screen real estate used for each text-only entry in the list. I just need something my pointer can hit, which doesn't require much space at all.)

Another point of contention: if I could get all of the Springboard functionality into the Dash AND disable the Springboard altogether, that would be perfect. I don't use the apps and places lenses, I don't pin launchers to this dock, and the current window-switching functionality of launchers is not intuitive. The window (not app or workspace) switching capability of both the Gnome 2 Talika applet (you had to get this through a PPA) and Windows 7 is more intuitive to me, but I suppose hovering over a launcher to pop out a mini-window showing all current windows of a given app clashes with Quicklists? In any event, I'd rather have all switching stuff (windows, apps, and workspaces) moved to separate pages of the Dash, docks are just clutter.

Alas, before that happens, it would be nice if bug #807141 was fixed, since Ubuntu now relies so heavily on Unity and Compiz. Currently my Dash intermittenly stacks behind other windows, making it useless. The Compiz maintainer states that stacking issues are near impossible to triage. If that is the case, it's unfortunate that Canonical hitched their wagon so readily to such a window manager. If you can't see a core piece of the user interface, that is pretty much a showstopper, especially in an LTS release.

I'd love for the Dash to A) be the center of attention, B) be configurable and C) work without issue though, as I think it's a good paradigm in general if its design potential is fully realized and the bugs are resolved.

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 1:02 PM, Josh Strawbridge <holyknightjoshua@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

i had a lot of the same thoughts a few weeks ago and i drew up a mock up of what i thought dash should be.

dash is very keyboard friendly but when I'm using a mouse (or tablet actually) it's not a very pleasant experience. i only use the first page of the dash to get to the second page. 

this is what i'd like to see on the first click of the dash button.

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-b0nFEjg8IUU/TjfzbXjLQsI/AAAAAAAAAE4/9WjTUSCdq2A/s912/Dash1.png