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I think the mode selection of the Nautilus sidebar currently has some flaws, that’s why I made a little mockup.

Please note this is not about its contents, there are already some interesting mockups for this.

I did nothing revolutionary, the changes are really pretty small. Here’s what I did in detail:

• Remove the border around the selection thingy, it seems useless to me and clutters the UI.
• Optional: Remove the close button, it looks weirdly out of place and provides duplicated functionality. You can hide and show the side pane with F9 or via the View menu.
• Change the dropdown into a toolbar. This should be more user friendly because you only need one click instead of two to cange the mode and it’s more visible that something can be clicked here at all. The current dropdown is only visible on mouse-over and looks like a label (besides the little down arrow).
• Fallback to dropdown, if the available space is to narrow, but always show the dropdown. The current doesn’t look like clickable, see above.

What do you think?

Konfigurationseditor

Deutsch: Seit Ubuntu 9.10 bzw. Gnome 2.28 werden standardmäßig in Menüs keine Icons mehr angezeigt. Bisher kann man dies jedoch in den »Erscheinungsbild-Einstellungen« unter »Oberfläche« wieder aktivieren.

Diese Option wird allerdings, zusammen mit dem kompletten »Oberfläche«-Reiter, in Gnome 2.30, also in Ubuntu 10.04 »Lucid Lynx« aus den Einstellungen verschwinden. Das heißt aber nicht, dass man die Menüsymbole nicht trotzdem wieder herbeischaffen kann.

Dazu startet man mit Hilfe des Ausführen-Dialogs oder eines Terminals das Programm gconf-editor. Hier sucht man nun den Pfad /desktop/gnome/interface und setzt dort den Haken für menus_have_icons.

English: In Ubuntu 9.10 (Gnome 2.28) menus don’t show icons per default anymore and the option to reenable them will be removed from the user interface in Ubuntu 10.04 (Gnome 2.30). If you want to reenable them, run gconf-editor from the »Run« dialog (Alt+F2) or from a terminal, go to /desktop/gnome/interface and check the option menus_have_icons.

… works with this command:

gnome-mount --write-settings --mount-options noauto --device /dev/sd[xn]

Shane Fagan tries to debunk some Gnome 3 myths. However, I don’t see the whole issue as bright and easy as he does. I’m a bit skeptic about this upcoming Gnome release.

He writes

Gnome will drop all support for Gnome-Panel
Actually it will be fairly easy to go back to Panel if you dont like Gnome-Shell its just “gnome-panel –replace” in command line.

This is NOT easy! It may be easy to do for you and for me, but it’s a bit ignorant, to think that makes it easy for everyone! Many people aren’t comfortable with a terminal and I don’t think this would solve the problem for them for good. It probably only replaces Shell with Panel in the current session. There needs to be a user visible option to get back to the old style. Terminal and gconf hacks aren’t the right thing to do here.

I think Gnome Shell has some more major usability bugs at the moment. Some might be easily solvable, some might be design inherent. I don’t know, make your own decission.

• The bar on the left with the filenames only works for very short filenames. Most of my files (not everybody in the world speaks English!) are longer than this and get truncated with “…” so that some of them aren’t even distinguishable, which makes the whole thing useless.
• The “Activities” item in the upper left corner is not really recognizable as clickable.
• It seems to be not as easy to find applications as with the categorized main menu in the current panel. It seems the categories are still there somewhere.

Also, where do I put things like Tomboy or GNote, the Hamster applet, the dictionary applet, and the like in the Gnome Shell? I don’t need all of them, but they are convenient programs for fast access to useful functions. Any new release of a software will have major acceptance problems, if it has less functions than the one before.

I’m also a bit skeptic about the performance that can be achieved with software written in JavaScript, but that could be a prejudice. The last time I tried Shell, it’s animations were far from being acceptable. But hey, it’s also far from being finished and I’d like to be proven wrong here.

I think, Gnome Shell is not bad per se, but the whole concept might not be entirely thought through. All of it’s features could have been done evolutionary, so one could see, if it really fits users needs. A big part of the UI changes seem to me like solutions for problems that don’t even exist.

I also don’t really see the use case for the whole timeline thing, but that might just be because I wasn’t able to use it yet.

… works by putting their names in a file called .hidden in the same directory. I find this useful to hide the lost+found folder in my home partition for example.