From the land of Shell

I suppose by now most have seen the mockups Jon presented at GUADEC – a nice visual overhaul with the special jimmac touch. Just in case you don’t know what I’m talking about, this is the mockup:

Some of you know already that I am busy implementing those mockups – today I finally felt confident enough about it to show it off, so I pushed a public branch. Even though there’s still a lot of work to do (especially with regard to the new DND behavior), it is slowly getting there:

Obviously, the devil is in the detail – not to talk about some gross hacks used – so I wouldn’t expect the branch to land soonish. But there it is, for fellow hackers and ancious users to give it a try …

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28 Responses to From the land of Shell

  1. I really like the effort that is being put in to make the gnome shell look good, but could something please, please be done about that glowing effect that you can see here for example in the left bar. In my opinion it’s really not very appealing (in my opinion of course).

    • fmuellner says:

      I do like the look of the new running indicators (a.k.a. as the glow effect), but then this is not any less of a personal opinion than yours. If it really bothers you, your best option is to talk to jimmac and mccann on #gnome-shell, as they are the people behind the shell’s design and visual appearance.

      • Jones Lee says:

        How flexible is the design? Is adding an option to change the indicator style easy?

        • fmuellner says:

          No, there won’t be any options to change the style of individual elements. All styling is done with CSS though, so it is not very hard to adjust (e.g. by custom themes).

  2. anonim says:

    looks great!

  3. Matt says:

    Good job!
    I’m happy to finally see something about gnome-shell on planet gnome!

  4. ramon says:

    Hi, Florian!

    Great work, nice look!!! Keep it up!! I am interested in grid view… could it be used in new design?

    Ramon (350 km. away from you) 🙂

    • fmuellner says:

      I’m afraid grid view is not part of the new layout(*), but if you take a look at the drag-and-drop mockups linked from the original posts, you will find quite a bit of grid mode preserved there.

      (*) see also this bug report

      • ramon says:

        You mean the “new DnD behaviour” linked above? It seems it provides some of the utility grid view had. I used to separate applications in different workspaces and switch between them through grid view. It was really awesome. I realised that I suddenly didn’t miss at all task bar from gnome 2 or windows operative system

        Don’t know if I’m a “representative” user 🙂

        Anyway, I’m sure you will cover that “need” somehow.

        Keep up with the work. It’s great. I’m looking forward to building a the new version (in a few days time).

        Ramon.

  5. Owais Lone says:

    Great! Looks like Unity though.

  6. korbe says:

    Great. It’s better than the old Gnome-Shell.

    But, I preffer the present-day desktop of Gnome 2.XX

  7. mccann says:

    Looking great! Awesome work so far. And so happy to see you on Planet GNOME.

    • fmuellner says:

      Well, thanks! Having been added to Planet GNOME was quite a surprise actually, as I didn’t manage to request it before having to go on a short trip to Germany this week … guess I need to extend my “people I owe a drink” list then.

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  13. It looks very beautiful! 😀 ,

    i think it would be interesting to do it like the Firefox 4.0 Candy Tabs, whith de possibility to group windows in thematic groups. It’s a pitty that i haven’t the skills and time to collaborate on the project 🙁 .

    • fmuellner says:

      Like workspaces? 😉

      Seriously, I don’t really see the usefulness of such a feature for anyone but a very limited set of “power users”. Those can be catered with an extension while keeping the interface clean for anyone else.

      • Eevee says:

        After a long time having no interest in Shell, I realized this week that its fluid on-the-fly virtual desktop management was absolutely perfect for me, and wondered why it had never been done before. Fixed physical desktops are awkward to maneuver between, and grouping windows by process name is utterly useless.

        But it’s already been a month since the one feature I want was dropped entirely? What?

        Why was this done? I can’t find any discussion or reasoning except for vague unsubstantiated “nobody will use it” reasons. Anyone who says they’d use it is deemed not a representative user. Well, that’s some fine circular reasoning.

        Who are these mythical users who understand and use virtual desktops but would hate the ability to manage them?

  14. spc says:

    Will it be possible to have Gnome sans Shell

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  16. Juanjo Marin says:

    It looks quite good !!! Keep rocking Florian !!!

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  18. Jeff Olson says:

    Hey Florian, the new overlay looks great! I’ve actually gotten a really recent build up.. 4a778 from overview-relayout rebased atop master in the gnome-shell repo.. had a successful rebase and build (always good to see branches that’ll rebase on master easily).. but the performance of the new activities overview is quite poor, I’m sad to say (mostly when hitting the Windows key to bring up the acitivities overview.. it takes a second for everything to get into place and be ready for input).

    I’m really excited with the design/impl of GNOME Shell (especially the focus on using javascript), I just hope this project doesn’t suffer the same fate of a lot of solutions that have a dynamic/interpretted layer, name perf (or lack thereof)?

    I’m not running a terribly “new” system, per-se, but it’s not bad either.. a pretty good single core proc (amd fx-55), 4gigs of RAM and a GeForce 7800 GT on ubuntu 10.10 32bit.. but still the perf on the new overview-relayout branch is bad enough that I’m gonna go back to HEAD on master.

    I don’t want to diss on your work as I’m really excited to see it succeed and know that there’s a reason it’s still not on it’s own branch and not in master, just curious if perf is a major concern relative to other feature/polish work that is going into the activities overview.

  19. JIMY says:

    @ jeff olson

    of course performance is going to be a major concern if gnome 3 didn’t perform better than gnome 2 who would care. It’s in so much development right now it’s not even funny. What kind of a question is that, and hey, just relax the guy is coding gnome 3 he’s implimenting the mock ups give him a break. Check back when something gets released.

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