I’ve just come across this mockup for Gnome 3, and I find it pretty cool 
Not that everything is desiderable but you can find some clever concepts in there:
- colored decoration basing on the application (so alikes look alike)
- notice how the maximized window contains the systray.
- easy and drag and drop based minimize and move-to-desktop.
Notice how the maximized window includes the systray
What do you think ?
Share it !
Man, that’s more than just a mockup! But thanks, that was cool to see – I like it.
Certainly hope they use this. Gnome looks pretty plain right now and it would really benefit from such an amazingly neat UI refresh. I don’t particularly like the colors but the UI is really amazing. There are so many things about standard OS’s that are really a pain. I hope topaz fixes these problems
I like windows colouring, looks nice. And whole windows placement mechanism looks interesting.
The only minus I’ve noticed: there is a plugin in Compiz, wich lets you do similar animation on windows focusing (new focused windows goes up, other go down so newly focused window flows on top). And I didn’t like it at all.
It shows you what is happening, visualises the process. On screencasts looks shiny, but it slows down workprocess, because you have to wait when all windows will slide on their new places. That annoys me much.
@brabadu: that’s one the things I didn’t like.
Do you think Ubuntu is going to use this? i LOVE it!
@Koen: Who knows
Impressive and FUNCTIONAL demo. Compiz is often too cluttered.
But as you show, clutter library rocks!
http://clutter-project.org/
I hope this is the start of cool ideas ,to give Gnome some real sweet looks and apps that can compliment each other.
dunno i can see it working but i can also see it failing, but i want to believe so fingers crossed
I think you missed the most important idea in this mock-up: titlebars go out of their way (literally) not to be hidden. That is the source of all the funny movement that windows are doing in the video. In a sense, this is kind of like a “lite” version of tiling window management. The huge advantage of this is that you can always find a window. This makes the taskbar (and dock) completely unnecessary, thus saving a lot of screen space. Even minimization wouldn’t really be needed, which the video seems to be implying subtly. The window manager would actually be managing windows. This would compliment the GNOME Shell work quite well.
Incidentally, the author of the mock-up put up a short explanation on GNOME-Look.org: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=107488
@David: well, I didn’t miss it, just not understood it completely. Not sure how much I like it. I really should try it
Some neat ideas in there. I’m not sure keeping all the titlebars visible necessarily saves screen real estate. I would think a single status bar at the bottom would be much more efficient than having 6 titlebars floating around. But this looks probably worse in the video just because they’re treating the Menu bar as part of the window header, so it’s two lines deep. A neat idea, but not if you’re going to keep them all visible.
I think there are a lot of innovations that could happen in window management, but at the same time I would worry about reaching too far too quickly. It would be nice to see some innovative change that wouldn’t necessarily make people change the way they have to work, but would be a much more efficient option that would make people *want* to change the way they work.
Of course I have absolutely no idea what that would be.
The design is so great!
I can’t wait to use GNOME 3 now!
@ Richard Querin
The title-bars that are always visible have 2 sides
1 – It is easy for new-computer-users. some aren’t even aware of the task-bar.
2 – It is claiming a lot of screen-space