Shell features

July 13, 2011

So Allan posted a pretty good summary of all the cool goings ons in shell land right now.

I thought I’d just follow up with a quick video showing two of the work-in-progress features, the login screen and the on screen keyboard.

As promised in my last post I’m going to do a follow up post with more details about where GDM is going in 3.2, but for now just the quick video: (click here)

22 Responses to “Shell features”

  1. foo Says:

    Why so tiny? What about a matrix of people like in GNOME Shell applications/search?

    • halfline Says:

      well that’s a question for the designers, but I will for a lot machines there’s not going to be more than 1 or a few users (there are exceptions and we should work well in those cases, too, of course)

  2. someone Says:

    Hahahah, the fact that your finger moves the mouse cursor is sooooooooo fucking lame. Stupid Xorg.

  3. someone Says:

    Also, why doesn’t the keyboard pop up when the password gets input focus?

  4. Bastien Says:

    I will note that if your computer has “builtin” keyboard and mouse (usually, fake USB devices that are available via Bluetooth), there’s nothing much we can do to hide the cursor.

    So it will usually work with a tablet computer, but not with a touchscreen computer that has fake USB devices (that are actually Bluetooth) because we have no way to tell whether those are plugged in.

    GDM looking awesome Ray! Lock screen next? :)


  5. […] is now actual code for the new login screen – check out the following video recorded by Ray Strode (who is implementing the new login […]

  6. Craig Says:

    Wow, this is beautiful, Awesome work.

  7. Chewi Says:

    May I make the recommendation to not only hide the cursor, but also to make the pushed keys not react, when in password-fields ?

    The point is that I was giving presentations before with the beamer already connected and there was no way to enter the password without the audience reading it from the feedback animations. (I had to reconvert my convertible to get to the physical keyboard…)

    I’d recommend the same to the screensafer-guis… ;-)

    Besides that: nice features.
    I hope the drag2scroll feature makes it to the popupMenus as well… :-)

    Cheers,
    Chewi

  8. mathw Says:

    Mmmmmm shiny!

  9. Jon Says:

    Please make sure you continue to honour “disable_user_list”. It’s not practical to enumerate all users in some contexts (we have thousands: GDM by default churns the machine like crazy trying to draw each user’s box and it’s totally impossible to navigate such a list)

  10. Para-Dox Says:

    Great work. ;)

  11. Marcus Says:

    One thing that stuck me:
    The top bar vanishes after entering the password and re-appears when the “normal” GS session is started.
    Would it be easy/feasable to make that a seamless transition (like it just gains some extra widgets, like the application menu when entering the real session). That would look awesome IMHO.

    Nice work, by the way!

    • halfline Says:

      That would actually be really neat, but it’s hard to do. The black bar at the top is run by different users (gdm versus the logged in user) so keeping it up is non-trivial. we could potentially do some hack where we freeze the screen at the last frame before login and then “thaw” it when the new panel is loaded and ready to go or something. Definitely something worth thinking about.

  12. Anonymous Says:

    Glossy screens suck. :)

    The new login dialog looks awesome. Would you consider adding an “add new user” feature at the login dialog?

    • halfline Says:

      jrb mentioned that too. Having that or maybe a “Login in as Guest” account that could be “promoted” to a real user later might be interesting.

  13. psychoslave Says:

    Any plan to fix bug 648749 ?

  14. Marcus Lundblad Says:

    Another thing, somewhat related to my above post about “blending in” with the session’s shell instance….
    Would it be feasable to do something similar for gnome-screensaver and the unlock dialog? I.e. letting the shell draw the password box. This “mode” should probably have the activities button “greyed out” (or hidden) and perhaps offer switch user and some other options in the top right menu, and show the password dialog (in the shell style) with the wallpaper behind. And then when returning to the session fade in the open windows in a transition and return to a “normal” gnome-shell session.
    How does this sound?


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