1) One thing confused me in the mockup: there’s no clear transition when a message in “notification mode” is moved to “summary mode”. So it looks like you get a message, which disappears, and then some other unrelated icons pop up for some reason.

I think it would help to animate the message shrinking into its icon, as the icon moves rightward into the “summary” part of the tray. That should help build a stronger connection between the notifications and their summary icons.

2) Other than that, I completely love this design and want it *right now*.

However there is one thing that really destroys a lot of usability for me: the bad, manual workspace handling.

Let me explain:

After starting GNOME(Shell) I need a basic set of applications: Browser, IRC, IM, Email. Browser and Mail get a workspace for themselves, IM and IRC can share one (this is only an example). Now, I need to write a text and start OOo Writer on a new workspace. While doing this I also start something different on yet another workspace. I finish the text doc and close Writer. Now I have an empty workspace and no way to get rid of it, other than manually move over the window(s) from the last workspace to this one and remove the last one.

It would rock if the Shell would do the cleanup work for me, e.g. remove a workspace after the last window is closed.

In my opinion, I think there indeed should be, but this could be nicely done by touching up something from the level of the GUI toolkit. I think we need a widget in GTK+ for a non-blocking but interactive (and semi-permanent) popup window like that notification bar. This same kind of bar could be used nicely within an application’s own window (eg: gedit uses these, as does Jokosher and some others) just the same as it could work globally. It’s a great replacement to floating dialog windows pretty much anywhere. (Floating, non-modal dialogs are flawed because they intend not to block interaction, but draw on top of the window anyway so might as well be modal).

Palm’s WebOS has a similar design, and it has been really well regarded.

Am I correct in hoping that this will not use the system tray spec for notification icons, but something more rigidly defined and more under the control of gnome-shell itself? (And that notification bubbles would become / be attached to their notification icons within the same simple library, permitting consistency in that end of the interface?)

If so, I deem this project not just fantastically amazing, but Amazingly Fantastic Stuff!

Now, quickly, get to the freedesktop mailing lists and shout about this before they redesign the libnotify spec and break all hope of interoperability.

Nice design document. I agree about having an active application menu, as that finally permits us a logical place to put application-level menu items like Help and Preferences, which is something I have always been jealous of MacOS about.

I think it would be good to exploit the non-invasive messaging area to display tips on desktop usage to new users. This could be disabled from the preferences. There could be a small program like “gnome-advice” which monitor what the user is doing and shows tips on a not-too-often and contextual manner.

Distrubutions like Ubuntu and other may like this approach since it’s also easy to extend/modify/disable/enable.

Just my 2¢.

But the panel! Damn, it’s simple and beautiful