Xfce design SIG

[Mișu Moldovan]

On 19.06.2011 21:08, Anzan Hoshin Roshi wrote:
> On 19 June 2011 17:29, Mișu Moldovan <dumol at xfce.org> wrote:
[snip]
>>  1) minimizing the waste of vertical space (so precious on a widescreen
>> display). Currently a typical app like Midori in Xfce, in a maximized
>> state, loses vertical space to: top panel, title bar, menu bar, toolbar,
>> tabs, status bar and bottom panel. That's a bit too much. Some apps try
>> to compensate for this by merging some of these elements (e.g. Chromium
>> merges the title bar with the tabs and the menu bar with the toolbar).
>> But the right approach seems to be to do it at the desktop level, like
>> Unity, which merges the menu bar and the title bar in the top panel for
>> maximized native apps.
>>
> [snip]
> 
> The universal menu is confusing because if you have more than one
> application open in a workspace (eg, Chromium, Xchat, Pidgin) you only have
> a menu for one of them. This is broken for any use other than maximised apps
> or for a tablet or smartphone. I use Nexus S, with Gingerbread Android
> 2.3.4. This kind of thing is appropriate there.

I'm not proposing to integrate the menu in the panel as Ubuntu Unity,
although I personally like their implementation. My idea is to unify the
title bar of the window with the menu bar and the optional tabs. This
fits unmaximized windows too...

Look at your opened windows: usually the title bar is mostly empty and
so is the menu bar in the right half. A possibility would be to
right-justify the title to make way for the menu on the left side. When
a new tab is created, the menu collapses to a button as in Chromium and
Firefox 4 and the title portion multiplies into two tabs between the
collapsed menu and the buttons. (Everything would be reversed for
right-to-left languages, but this should be a non-issue with GTK+).


> There is no need to be miserly about vertical space.

It depends on the display. I personally use my main monitor rotated at
90 degrees because I mostly work with text so I'm not much bothered. But
on a netbook, things get pretty crowded.


>>  2) diminishing the scrollbar (as seen in Ubuntu 11.04 and OSX Lion).
>> Given the fact that scrollbars and their buttons are rarely clicked
>> (because of scroll wheels and keyboard usage), they are generally a
>> waste of pixels. They should be slimmer or invisible when static (as in
>> mobile OSes) and showing buttons only when the mouse cursor crosses the
>> scrollbar area. It seems GTK+ theming is not enough for this, Ubuntu
>> 11.04 has bundled some specialized extra packages (*overlay-scrollbar)
>> that implement a new GTK+ widget that enables this dynamic behavior.
> 
> The length of the scrollbar gives instant information on the length of the
> document being viewed. It needs to be visible.

It could be visible but much slimmer, not necessarily invisible when
static... But I must say in iOS it disappears completely when static and
it's very usable, for me at least it's enough to see its length when
scrolling and I get an idea of how much I have to scroll. As for the
argument of mouses without scroll wheels raised by Charlie Kravetz, the
scrollbar buttons would become visible when the mouse approaches the
scrollbar, conveniently displaying the scroll buttons too. Please check
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/615 for a taste of it.

But please remember my proposals are not in the spirit of GNOME3 which
seems to be „their way or the highway”. They should be all optional
features, even if activated by default. Thus a user which prefers
separated title / menu / tool / tab / status bars can easily separate
them by not loading the associated GTK+ module. The same for the
scrollbar or the keyboard shortcut theme.

-- 
mișu

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