I’ve just stumbled over to your blog – firstly, may i say that some of your mock-ups look awesome.

Appreciating the fact that they are mock-ups, are you able to tell me where you acquired the theme/icons/wallpaper for the below mock-up please:

http://www.wine-doors.org/screens/desktop3000.thumb.png

Great work, love your blog!

Any idea if I’m missing anything here? Thanks!

My biggest problem with the dock is that is seems to go in the wrong direction: shouldn’t the “desktop” be moving towards more of a document-centric direction? The dock is heavily application-centred, and that bothers me a great deal. Even the Xerox Alto didn’t expose the concept of ‘application’ to the user, and, yet, we keep forcing users to deal with this artificial concept all the time. We should be figuring out how to get rid of that concept as much as possible, not adding more of it. If anything, I think the Gimmie/Mayanna dock offers a better organization paradigm than does the Mac OS X dock.

with application orientation you’d raise all of the windows in the order they are currently in at the same time, that’s why it’s ideal to use expose along side them… remember though this is mental ramblings and a source of ideas rather than a final concept.

It would probably be useful to discuss these ideas with the rest of the ui-hackfest people before I dig myself any deeper.

Love the GNOME menu item in the top-left hand corner. Very simple and classy.

One thing that I really dislike about docks is the way they don’t use screen corners. You seem to have got around that by using a dock and at the same time adding items into each of the bottom corners – an interesting approach. Do you really need the actions menu in the bottom right, though? You seem to be reproducing the functionality of the GNOME menu. Why not use that corner to trigger some kind of window management operation, like Scale/Expose?

Let’s reduce the number of icons in the notification area. I mean, do I really need a Bluetooth applet?! In a previous lifetime, I put some ideas about redesigning the notifications UI on GNOME Live: http://live.gnome.org/AlternativeNotificationsUI

I see no main menu of any kind. How can that be?! Please, let’s not let the dock become THE location for launching applications. I’m bored of wading my way through a gazillion icons (stored in no particular order) to find what I’m looking for.

Are you saying one icon per application, irrespective of the number of windows that application has open? The inevitable question – what happens when you have LOTS of windows open with the same application?

I agree that it is well worth learning from Apple’s usability studies. GNOME just doesn’t have the resources in that area. Still, we also need to be a little careful in how we interpret their results. This isn’t neutral research – Apple have a particular set of interests which might not tally with our own.

in fact, I didn’t express any preference for one over the other…

I don’t see it, and in my honest opinion, I think that by trying to realize something that is already there, we will always be in late.

on the contrary, innovation is to realize something that maybe doesn’t make all that sense, but leads us somewhere nobody else went… do you want the simplest and less useful example? compiz!

from there, we are leading, others are re-doing

here I see re-doing things that others already did

my 2 cents… didn’t mean to be destructive, though! keep up the good work

thanks for your free work and your passion in free software
bye

Great work!

It is an annoying piece of eye candy with little benefit and the detrimental side effect of making items shift back and forwards and making them harder to hit.

Now that the patent for the expanding dock has been granted to Apple (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=7,434,177), maybe we can put this expanding dock dead end behind us and perhaps focus on aspects of a universal dock that could actually make it more user friendly and effective.

@andreas, i think you have missed the point… application oriented workspaces are far more productive than task oriented workspaces, I mean jesus, why the hell would i want to bring forward one window of gimp at a time on a crowded desktop? seriously, the gnome desktop in all its glory is sitting in the past with the task management, we really need to actually think about why the apple dock is good and using the extensive usability testing that apple have done to our advantage.

@Matt, wizbit isn’t really a file system, in robs words “wizbit is a loose object store with revision control” which is probably the best way of describing it even if it isn’t very descriptive, essentially what we’re talking about is a whole revision control system for data objects, now of course those objects can be files, but they can also be things like tomboy notes, calendar entries, contacts and much much more. So you’ve got kinda the right idea about what we’re doing but you’ve only seen part of the picture, wizbit is much more but sure, sync across devices is one of the things that John and Mark at codethink have been beavering away on and it would be perfectly conceivable for you to sync to a secure backup location, but of course not just sync, but sync histories

@airtonix, replacing all of the panel features on a dock wouldn’t be my plan, but the task manager/launcher and some other minor things definitely. I suppose you really have to use the osx dock for a little while to “get it” but

@neil, thanks for your support I mean, if you can strip back AWN to a basic core of code that’s pluggable then that would be great, in the mean time I wrote this to be smooth and usable for an application oriented desktop (as metacity fails at this).

the idea is that you remove all of gnome-panel and use awn instead.

something that will be easier to consider when awn becomes alot more stable and it’s menu applets provide a 1:1 clone of the gnome menu and its functionalities.