[ubuntu-art] next meeting

[Álvaro Medina Ballester]

El 10/02/2008, a las 14:45, Jan Niklas Hasse escribió:

> Anyway, instead of showing me the real names of the apps, do you  
> have any _solid_ opinion or any critic point to my idea?
>
> Your idea is that applications are still running when i close their  
> window? And that they will appear in an app selector? Well, the idea  
> is not bad, but the tray does this already. When i close my app i  
> can reopen it by clicking the tray icon. My critic point is: Instead  
> of developing an app selector, we should drop the idea of the tray  
> as a notification area and improve it instead.
>
> I mean, music apps go to "tray" in Linux... and what? I was saying  
> that in my opinion this is not the right place to keep open apps.
>
> Why? I think it's a good place because a small icon doesn't take  
> much place and i can perform actions like changing settings in the  
> context menu of the icon.

I'm glad to hear your opinion!

Well, we have some points in common. We believe that the "pipe" I  
described is a good way to manage applications and windows, but we're  
not agree in one thing, where those open apps should be represented on  
the desktop.

I far prefer not putting open apps in the system tray because I think  
that the tray should be used for things that are always open (clock,  
volume manager or volume applet, network manager, etc.). So I think  
that we're mixing two things in the same place.

In addition, I think that putting a lot of small icons would not be  
the best way to manage the open apps because those apps are the main  
use of the desktop. For example, when I'm doing some university stuff  
I have scribes open and the terminal to do gcc's and make's, so I  
think that the best way to manage those open apps is keeping them  
separately from another things like clock applet that you're not using  
constantly. And if you have bigger icons that makes easier to  
distinguish what do you want to select.

Changing the settings in the context menu of the icon is a very good  
idea. That can be implemented also in an app selector. This is what I  
like to call the power of simplicity.

When I said that about Windows culture I didn't explained myself very  
well. In my university, some software engineering teachers (not some,  
all) believe that Windows way to do things with the computer is the  
good one just because "everybody uses it", they don't know another  
ways to work with the desktop and so they've learned to work in a  
Windows way so if they have another better options they don't consider  
them because they have learned Windows way and they don't want to  
think further.

I remember discussing how bad is Windows external devices manager with  
my teacher. If you plug 3 or 4 devices you can't know which is the usb  
pen, which is the media player, etc. But in gnome's desktop, every  
device is on the desktop so you can manage them very easily. My  
teacher still believes that Windows does that better. I think that  
this is what we need to avoid.

Thank you for considering my ideas again.


Cheers.