[desktop-discuss] [indiana-discuss] Indiana desktop UI spec - early draft

[James Cornell]

Shawn Walker wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 12:39 PM, Andrew Watkins <andrew at dcs.bbk.ac.uk> wrote:
>   
>>  Shawn Walker wrote:
>>  > On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Calum Benson <Calum.Benson at sun.com> wrote:
>>  >>  On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 13:08 -0400, Sebastien Roy wrote:
>>  >>  > I also don't see the point in cluttering panels with needless menus if
>>  >>  > they're already available through the "Launch" menu.
>>  >>
>>  >>  I agree, but currently we don't have the 'Launch' menu on the panel in
>>  >>  Indiana... so we need to decide which to go with. (One advantage of the
>>  >>  Apps/Places/Systems menus is that broader and shallower menu systems
>>  >>  are, generally, easier to navigate than narrow and deep ones.)
>>  >
>>  > I too was initially thrown off when I first saw the "shallow menus" in
>>  > GNOME when I used Ubuntu.
>>  >
>>  > After I got used to it though, I loved it!
>>  >
>>  > I personally am in favour of keeping the Apps, Places, System menus as
>>  > I think they are great for easy navigation.
>>  >
>>  > It's so much better than having one large menu and having to dig
>>  > through it for commonly used things.
>>  >
>>
>>  I am still a big fan of the old JDS layout and with the one panel at the
>>  bottom and one launch menu. I know it was there to look like Windows XP,
>>  but it works. I know and the end of the day it does not matter since we
>>  can change it to any which way, but I still believe that we should have
>>  a slightly different look and feel than the standard GNOME interface.
>>     
>
> If I remember right, Ximian GNOME used to have this "visual
> preferences" dialog that you would get on first login.
>
> It allowed you to easily switch between a set of "default styles" that
> configured it so that the panel was at the top and bottom, or only at
> the bottom like Windows, etc.
>
> KDE desktops used to do the same thing too, don't know if they still do.
>
> While I don't think such a question should be at startup (bad design
> imo and scary to new users), I think that making it easy to switch
> between a set of different default layouts would be good to have.
>
> Some sort of tool under settings / appearance would be neat.
>
> I could see a default layout configuration that was more suitable for
> CDE users for example ;)
>
>   
Regarding KDE, they still do prompt the user for a desktop experience 
setting.  (Windows, Mac, UNIX, and KDE)

Don't know about KDE, but I doubt they changed it, as the desktop looks 
the same from screenshots.

James