Gnome’s design playground is a happy place where everyone is allowed and encouraged to make a design proposal, discuss the possible problems of the idea or the implementation, and finally collaborate with others.
As these ideas are not always good or very well thought out, many of them change dramatically till they get implemented, or don’t get implemented at all. Here is a list of some interesting proposals active right now!
Alternate calendar systems in Gnome-Shell
The problem right now is that Gnome-Shell doesn’t support non-Gregorian calendars, so Iranians, Arabs and Israelis can’t easily switch between the two.
The proposal is that users must be able to select their primary and secondary calendar and then the main calendar will be primary one and equal days of secondary calendar will be shown next to dates of main calendar.
Gnome TV Mode
The idea behind this proposal is for Gnome to become more easily usable in the context of a TV appliance. The hypothesis here is that you should be able to boot your GNOME session on a “Big Screen Mode” and use most of GNOME apps with a remote controller.
Currently, there aren’t much third-party solutions to make your GNOME computer usable on a TV with remote controller. A GNOME-integrated solution could mean that you’ll be able to write an app for the big screen, using only the existing GNOME framework.
Data Sync
The idea is to create an app to sync some GNOME data between PC’s. Similar to what Chrome or Firefox do.
The stuff that could be synced using this app are Online Accounts, Wallpapers, Extensions, List of favourite APPS in the dock, Keyboard Shortcuts, Nautilus and Epiphany’s Bookmarks and some other config info.
Gnome Games
This proposal is about the creation of a games app that would look and work in the same or similar way to Gnome Music, Videos and Photos. Right now native games, wine games, other emulated games and web games are in different places and launched in different ways.
Gnome Games app aims to change all that by making the most, if not all of a user’s games available from one place, bringing a common interface to multiple emulators and keeping the actions needed between launching the app and launching a game to a minimum.
Gnome Autosave
This proposal aims to replace the traditional notion of manually having to “save” a file in our applications with a new model based on implicit, continuous autosaving. This would make Gnome feel more natural, make data loss more difficult and eliminate unnecessary upfront decisions like file naming and placement.
The proposal includes the autosave of a document on Gnome documents with the preservation of the ability to later change the name, make copies and change the location. The undo function would take you to a previously saved version of the same document that would basically work as “reverting the latest changes”.
This proposal is very interesting and especially hard to implement correctly. You should definitely take a look at the discussion on the corresponding live page.
Twitter Widget
This proposal is about creating a small tool that would help users instantly tweet from their Gnome desktop. It would also provide the ability to share on Facebook, identi.ca and evernote.
Unifying The Tab Experience
A lot of Gnome applications use tab navigation to help users do their thing in a more modern and easier way. These include Empathy, Epiphany (Web), Gedit, Terminal, Gimp, Gnome system monitor and Nautilus (Files).
This proposal is about homogenizing the tab behavior in Gnome, making all applications able to offer the same tab-functions using exactly the same keyboard shortcuts.
These are maybe the most interesting proposals in the design playground right now. If you want to see them all, visit the Gnome Playground webpage.
Some of the above proposals are old and probably won’t see the green light, while some of them are new and exciting but hard to implement. Whatever the case, keep in mind that this article is about proposals and nothing more. All of the images on this article are just mockups that you may never see and use in Gnome ever.
The case is, what of the above would you most like to see becoming reality? What do you think would make Gnome truly better and more modern?