alex diavatis | June 8, 2012

Gnome-Shell gets its first facelift!

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

Great news everyone!  Gnome-Shell went to plastic surgeon and gained a brand new face!

One more controversial feature has been added and that will get Shell again be discussed but not being disgusting!

 

So what is new? Application Categories are finally gone and gone for good! Other than this we have a new App Launcher on the bottom of dash. Enjoy!

Before you start grumbling (some people will definitely get unhappy about it) think that categories are obsoleted from every modern user interface system, and there are plenty of reasons for this. First off, you cannot categorize perfectly, secondly many Apps can belong to two or more categories and that brakes the consistency of the system and third and more important, systems nowdays are getting quite smart to understand what are you looking for using metadata and searching optimized algorithms like zeitgeist.

You are still not convinced?  Think that even on the more complex interface systems like Amazon most of the  users don’t use categories instead they just type on search box.

While this design idea had proposed a long time ago, it just now arrives on Shell and this is fantastic because the modern becomes moderner (and the unusable becomes unusabler for some people!) and also is the first major change on Shell after 1.5 years.

That’s all for now.

*This is still a mockup and hasn’t yet merged on gnome-shell, so there might be changes.

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  • Sicofante

    “First off, you cannot categorize perfectly”

    Looking at a huge collection of icons filling the screen can’t be called “perfect” either…

    “secondly many Apps can belong to two or more categories and that brakes the consistency of the system”

    Use labels (check Gmail for a reference) and let apps belong into more than one category. No consistency break whatsoever.

    “and third and more important, systems nowdays are getting quite smart to understand what are you looking for using metadata and searching optimized algorithms like zeitgeist.”

    And people are getting tired of having to move from mouse to keyboard and back constantly. That’s what this “let’s base everything on search” brings.

    Now what are the rest of those “plenty of reasons”? I mean, besides the silly notion of “modernness”.

    PS: Couldn’t care less about the Amazon example. That’s a website. This is a desktop OS, although GNOME devs keep forgetting it again and again.

    • Alexis Diavatis

      1. While no perfect is the best proven solution so far, all systems do that
      2. Google also uses that way on Chrome & Chrome OS (I am saying because you used Gmail as example)
      3. People use Facebook, Google and Amazon. They are used by now on type & seek
      4. Indie apps can’t or don’t categorized properly as there isn’t any standardization.  And it can’t be.  If you get many apps, categorization stops to be useful. Translations could be complex, some English terms cant be translated to other languages, and vice verca.. There are reasons.. 

      • Sicofante

        1. Proof needed. “All systems do that” is no proof. Not in a world of “modernness”
        2. Chrome is a browser and Chrome OS is a deliberately handicapped desktop OS. You don’t want to use that as proof. Gmail was used only to let you know what I mean by labels, not that a menu system should be organized as gmail.
        3. Webapps vs desktop OS again? You’re not being serious about Google, are you?
        4. Pure opinion, not facts.

      • http://alexandrubucur.com CoolGoose

        It’s dumb because even in google you have tags / circles aka categories.

        If you don’t like having programs put in arbitrarily by developers at least allow me to categories them how I like them.

      • natem

        > 1. While no perfect is the best proven solution so far, all systems do that

        Which is exactly why saying “First off, you cannot categorize perfectly” makes no logical sense in this context. You can use the excuse that categorization isn’t perfect in order say that it needs to be eliminated and replaced with something else that is never going to be perfect either. 

        It’s not a argument that supports your position at all. It’s a ‘red herring’. 

        > 3. People use Facebook, Google and Amazon. They are used by now on type & seek

        Some people use those interfaces.  However not a single person has ever used desktop with no application menu.  So ‘familiarity’ is another red herring. 

        > 4. Indie apps can’t or don’t categorized properly as there isn’t any standardization.  And it can’t be.  If you get many apps, categorization stops to be useful. Translations could be complex, some English terms cant be translated to other languages, and vice verca.. There are reasons.. 

        Application search will always have the same exact problems. Every single thing you say there can be applied as a argument against dependence on search. 

  • jon_downfromthetrees

    That display is not revolutionary or even modern,  It is a simple scrolling list of applications.  I.e., a tricked out quasi-directory listing

    I use that display to find things. It’s annoying to be forced to scroll through dozens of icons.  The icons add *nothing* to the information that displays presents. A simple list of filenames would be just as informative, and much less annoying.

    Search in this context is appropriate only if two conditions apply:  1.  The user does not know the name of the app/file he is looking for.  2.  The search engine is smart enough to reliably translate whatever the user enters into something it uses to locate the app/file the user wants. E.g., if the user enters “resize photo”, search ought to display links to applications that can resize photos. Even then, search ought to be offered as a supplemental function, rather than as the primary way to access the file system. What I see happening is search keying on spelling, which is not very smart and provides no guarantee that anything useful will be returned at all unless, again, the user knows what he’s looking for.

    The comparison to Amazon is too broad brush.  When I use Amazon, I either go directly, via menus, to the section I want, or I narrow the range of my search.  Even then, Amazon typically returns dozens or hundreds of options.  I don’t want my OS to behave like that.

    OS X now offers a similar full-screen big-icons display of applications.  I’m certain the Gnome designers studied it.  I don’t use it, either.  Instead, I take the option OS X provides, i.e., the Finder. The Gnome equivalent is Nautilus.  The difference is that Gnome makes their full-sceen big-icon display the centerpiece of the current design, while it’s hidden away and highly avoidable in OS X.

    • mieses

      “icons add *nothing*”
      i completely agree. so much time is being wasted on the icons, effects, drop shadows, rounded corners, and other decorative nonsense.
      let’s assume for a moment that there is some novice user (do such users exist any more?) who needs big pretty icons to approach the computer.  what is that user going to do with the Boxes vm application and the Terminal?  i love gnome but this whole direction is so misguided..  please make the design more intelligent. let the designers work on issues of substance. do not let them waste time on icons and effects.  this is approaching KDE disneyland style. windows 8 metro looks downright rational and appealing by comparison. i’m looking at alternatives (xfce?) more and more but none seem to be as good as gnome 2.

      • jon_downfromthetrees

        Nothing is wrong with icons, but as used in the Overview they really don’t add any information compared with a list of filenames.  The information that icons *and* filenames don’t provide is a clue to what the application does. Application names in Linux (not just Gnome) are very often particularly unrelated to the purpose of the application. E.g., if someone is scrolling through the Overview looking for a way to edit photos, the Gimp name and the Gimp icon don’t tell him that Gimp edits photos. How do you know what Brasero or Banshee do?   The entire construct of the Overview assumes the user already know what he wants. So does Search, as implemented. Similar features in KDE and OS X suffer from the same deficiencies.

        Rather than go with the Overview, to cater to neophyte users. I would have put in place a display of *small* icons (optionally changeable to filenames), categorized into “Applications”, “Utilities” and “System Tools”, with a short one-line description of each entry appearing adjacent to the icon/filename. To cater to experienced users, I would put similar capability in Nautilus. As it stands now, experienced users will likely fill the launcher or an add-on dock with icons for their favorite apps and avoid the Overview as much as possible. (I also wish I could launch GUI apps from a Terminal without triggering a niosy display of error messages.  OS X uses an “open” command for this.  E.g., “open Safari”.  It’s well worth adopting.)

        Effects, shadows, icons, etc., are not “decorative nonsense” if each of them has a purpose other than decoration. They are elements that can and *should* be used to convey information to the user. E.g., put a darker background behind an icon when selected by a mouse click.  

        To get an interface design “right” requires designers with talent and a single vision of that design that is enforced by a single individual. I’m not sure the ethos of open source lends itself to that.

  • eon

    Actually what will be interesting here (and that was not said) is that the user will be able to organize the apps like he wants on the grid.

    So you can have most used apps on the top and less used apps at the bottom…

    http://jimmac.musichall.cz/log/?p=1181

    • Alexis Diavatis

      Thank you for the notice,  we ll do this in a more detailed post. 

    • Parry

       Will it automatically do that? Because I like alphabetical order. I just need it to be like that so I can find anything.

      • alex285

        We will try this when it merges into Git and we’ll print in detail here. But I guess shell grid will be extended with users extensions to do whatever :)

  • Brett Legree

    I like this much better, it makes more sense to me, and looks cleaner.

  • simon080

    oookkkkk. So now when you want to browse applications according to the Category… eg: You have installed some games and in future you want to browse them… you have to go through the ENTIRE list of installed applications to find what you want…… I guess as usual… The Gnome Devs find another feature which “was” useful that they now want to take away from the user…. charming. So not only does Gnome-shell offer a featureless Desktop Environment “for the average user” requiring them to learn the gnome-shell.css text file in order to customize their Desktop… They take away more features which makes gnome-shell “semi” useable…. hell… Might aswell Take away Application icons… no need for that… takes up space… let’s have Text filenames in the overview instead of icons! Heyyyy… That system settings control panel might be a little too confusing for our users… Let’s disable all the gui features that enable you to customize or tweak anything and make a new system config file in css that you have to learn and configure… Hell… Disable the ability to change Wallpapers out of the box Too just like themeing and hope that a community member comes up with an extension for that!

    Gnome 3+ is getting beyond a joke in my opinion

    • http://nuitka.net/ Kay Hayen

      Shht, don’t give them ideas.

  • Mittro889

    Extremely misleading and non-professional work. The title says “Gnome-Shell gets its first facelift!” which got everyone excited and then at bottom adds a footnote “*This is still a mockup and hasn’t yet merged on gnome-shell, so there might be changes.” Can’t be trusted :(

  • http://profiles.google.com/linuxcanuck Linux Canuck

    Yes, but why is it still so ugly. Big icons and text.  Nothing is sleek and modern looking. It looks like a UI for kids.

  • Alec Teal

    You’d love Metro……..
    This is not a compliment.

  • http://www.fewt.com/ Fewt

    Congratulations you guys have invented Netbook Remix.   Will some real developers please take this project over and bring some sanity to GNOME 3?

    • Omer Akram

      you mean designers.

    • ScionicSpectre

      I can’t be sure what you mean by sanity. Do you mean a small categorical menu, or did you have another suggestion?

  • http://www.mhall119.com/ Michael Hall

    Does this mean that zeitgeist will be made a part of gnome core?

  • bg

    I use the search most of the time.  What I dislike is that multiple applications have the same names
    in particular file and terminal.   The application icon list never tells you the actual binary name
    being called either, so I have to go hunt for it.

  • me

    Is your tablet user base really so large that you chose to completely ignore laptops/desktops? This UI is obviously for tablets. It’s very quirky with the traditional mouse/keyboard use

    • alex285

      MS & Apple are also moving to that direction. Tablets will overcome laps/desk sooner than expected, while laps get touch screen support. Ok, GNOME isn’t still working on touches, but it will on 3.6 or 3.8 most likely. 
      However if you don’t like this, and while you still have a desktop, you can try some other more “traditional” solutions like Cinnamon. I am not saying to move to Cinnamon (personally I don’t like it) but if you feel that you “must”, you have that option. 

      • aidanjt

        And if Microsoft and Apple ran and jumped off a cliff, at what point would you suddenly stop and think ‘this probably isn’t a good idea’?  Before you jumped off with them, or shortly after the sudden stop at the bottom?

        One way Linux desktop could have massively differentiated itself is by not utterly destroying the desktop paradigm.  You failed.

        • alex285

          I failed indeed, was a bad example. But can’t be everyone wrong to use that technique. Anyway I won’t never compare again GNOME with Apple and MS.. My bad. 

          • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_NAP3I3ONQIAIPB6IXMXKSMJEQE Roman

            Having a well organized launcher menu as opposed to OS X row of icons, or windows too many folders sorted by company has been a usability advantage of most Linux desktops for a long time.  I don’t think this should be taken away.

            Mrspacklecrisp may have been a bit harsh but I don’t see how this wouldn’t be worse on a touch device(where users prefer not to type things if possible). I installed categorize on my n900 to get nice category based menus and am still looking for something to do organize my icon list for my new android phone(most solutions want you to classify apps by hand).

      • Jon

        ” Tablets will overcome laps/desk sooner than expected, while laps get touch screen support.”

        Even if that is/were the case, do you really think that actual work will be done on touch screens only? Even regular office work, not even programing etc, requires a keyboard and a mouse. Anything more complicated than pressing buttons in a browser  does. What you are doing is build a system around touch screens that will in effect not be suited to real work. Even if a jumble of icons is beneficial to touch screens (which is debatable) you will constantly be switching between the touch screen and other input devices.

        That doesn’t even touch on the various reasons why categories are a good idea. It’s baffling to me how something as obviously beneficial as categories is brushed away without sound reasoning. It’s simple logic. Mess of icons = slow, categories = faster.

        A search feature only works if you know at least some part of the name of an app for sure, otherwise you need costly (in complexity and development time) search algorithms and constant updating / maintaining of accurate tags for *every* app.

    • Mrspacklecrisp

       Are you that dumb? This is terrible for tablets. I don’t want drag through a big stupid list of applications to find what I want to use without any way to categorize. I have WAY more applications in gnome than on, say, a phone. Dragging through the whole list is not helpful to me.

      • alex285

        @40645d3c0d69411f5f88be85132afb06:disqus  Please be more polite, we don’t want to delete comments but also we don’t want such attitudes. Be critical to the opinion but not in person. 

  • Martin de Boer

    Dumb. Realy Realy Dumb. It was one of the few things I really liked about Gnome 3.

  • AthrenGlory

    Consider giving options instead of one size fits all concepts. Basically make settings default on what ever you feel is best, yet give me the user the ability to tailor it to what works with me by simply clicking a button on that page that displays user friendly options to adjust the settings.

    For example there should be an option where I assign if I want to show categories or not, if I want these categories to appear on the left or right hand side. if this conflicts with the dock I should be able to re-position the dock, or enable it to only show on the desktop. Or change the icons to a text based format, or text based with small icon thumbnail…etc.

    • alex285

      Nicely said, but this will be a community job (with extensions) I guess. Sometimes developers just can’t do everything they wish, that doesn’t mean that they disagree or they don’t like options like what you suggested. 

      • AthrenGlory

        I understand what I say does require work, and it isn’t as if I have room to talk as my lack of having any programming experience limits me to be more of a critic than a contributor. So I guess I will be reliant on the open source community to make such extensions if others feel similar as I do, but with the know how to actually do something about it.

        • alex285

          If you can design and make some mockups of what your saying we would be glad to print them here, you never know what happens next.

  • No

    Seems like an overly bad version of what Ubuntu has done with Unity.  The only nicer part of Gnome was the categories.  Just merge your project with Ubuntu, and let the extra developers fix bugs in Launchpad

  • Not_a_happy_camper

    “Great news everyone!”

    Really? I see it as “Bye bye gnome-shell, it was nice until it lasted”. Interface might work in few cases like small screen and pure english.

    “First off, you cannot categorize perfectly, secondly many Apps can belong to two or more categories and that brakes the consistency of the system and third and more important, systems nowdays are getting quite smart to understand what are you looking for using metadata and searching optimized algorithms like zeitgeist.”

    So… instead of simply putting it in both categories (Occams razor), you opt to create one single category where everything is thrown in. Like… removing all your wardrobes from your flat and putting everything around. And you removed the pesky need to open the drawers. And since you see everything on the floor you don’t need to search in which wardrobe it was.

    Second, sorry to burst your bubble, but search is worthless when I select language of my country, I don’t intend to do 2 searches every time. Even now I simply used search when reliable and groups when not. 50% apps are still in english since it would be insane to demand translation for every small app, while distro provided are mostly translated which makes 2 words for same term. 

    The way I see, there are 3 solutions:
    - I only use apps that provide translation and never install anything but basics
    - I end up with bunch of icons in launch bar since search doesn’t work, but at the same time that bar is also filled with running applications which makes it downright stupid
    - Suffer for 3-4 releases until developers get to their sense and listen to the users like with shutdown
    - I look for alternative shell that is provided from OS install and works nicely with gnome

    Can you guess my choice?

    • alex285

      I know what you mean, but try to think otherwise. Shell (tries to provide) provides you the most efficiency way and not the way you might like. Typing is the fastest way. I even do this in my cellphone when I am looking for contacts. I don’t check on groups, although I have.  

      In theory you don’t need to change layout to search for a language, this is a bug. Of course Gnome-Shell isn’t perfect.. actually is far away from perfection, but at least it’s the only shell that has the potential.I can guess your choice but I can’t even spell this word in here :) 

      • aidanjt

        How in the name of God is lumping a hundred applications into one never-ending application scrollfest which in no way convey what you’re trying to do ‘efficient’?

      • Not_a_happy_camper

        LOL? Where in my comment did you noticed me talking about not liking it (but, since you provoked this part… here it is, I really don’t like it, in fact I hate it on my phone, I hate it on my tablet and no way in hell will this be part of my computer).

        Read my post again. I disputed it as non workable in multitude of occasions and working in few rare ones. Should non-english people start filing bugs against every non translated application into xyz language or do you suggest they stop using them? Search can’t work effectively if metadata is in multitude of languages, but based on your “LALALA, CAN’T HEAR YA!”  I’m willing to bet this spells as bug in those applications in your head. Application grouping might not be perfect, but at least it provided solution to occasions where search was bad for named reasons. I used type->run way before gnome-shell. First with my own app, then with gnome-do.

        p.s. let me spell you for you. i’m gonna fsck off elsewhere, which is a shame since i used gnome as it was from pre-1.0 times. I’ll still use it, just not with default shell. and don’t worry, I’ll be careful so door doesn’t hit me on my way out.

  • Zeng

     The search box does not benefit most CJK users, while many CJK users does not remember all the English names of apps. GNOME is more and more English-centric desktop environment these days.

    • daengbo

      You get to search the description of your app, too, which should be localized.

      • natem

        You need somebody to go and populate useful results in their language to actually be useful. It doesn’t matter if the search is localized if the search is useless when it’s localized. 

        Seeing how the search is not terribly useful in English I don’t see how it would be useful in any of the dozens others of languages that people may end up using. 

        Not to also mention that people will want to use more then just ‘Gnome’ applications. So the Gnome developers cannot possibly fill the search database with useful results. It’s simply a mathematical impossibility for the Gnome search to provide all the useful results for searches all the time when the information required to provide useful results is never going to exist for a very significantly large number of applications.

        • bentinc

           I can assure you that the search is absolutely useful in german language. And you do _not_ have to know the name of the application, any reasonable keyword will do.

          • Bruno Unna

            Back to Natem comment, a while ago: try to search for terms resulting in “Brasero”. In plain English, not to mention Spanish or German. It’s hard to believe that the only way to get to an app is by previously knowing its name. Well… not exactly. You can browse a huge set of large icons, as well, and wish that the one you chose is the right one.

        • daengbo

          Not to be rude, but do you know the way that it searches? It’s by app description, which is in the .desktop file, a defined cross-desktop spec from FreeDesktop.org which basically every desktop on Linux  and BSD uses. The applications are translated by the translation / localization teams. Everything works quite well.

          Want a torrent app? Search for “torrent” no matter the language you are using. Or you can search for “สเปรดชีท” for a spreadsheet app if you are in Thai.

  • mirek2

    I also don’t like this. Moreover, I don’t see what problem this is solving.
    The current UI is certainly not overcrowded when categories are shown, and apps belonging to several categories was never a consistency problem (why is it wrong for an application to be listed in 3 categories if it really belongs in those categories? You can put a blog post under several categories if you need to — does that confuse people in any way?).
    I can see the improved usability in pagination (as icons now have a grounded position, which makes them easier to target over time), but that could have been implemented without getting rid of categories.

    I wouldn’t mind, though, if it wasn’t for the lack of usability of this interface. This UI is intended for browsing. And it’s horrible for that purpose, as now you get an unsorted hodgepodge of applications. Just look at the screenshot above — two browsers, some graphic editors, two Settings panels (what are those doing there?), three messaging applications, etc., scattered, not visually connected in any way. Not even the OpenOffice modules appear next to each other. And I’m puzzled at how the apps are sorted in this case, as they’re not even in alphabetical order.

    If you were supposed to use the searchbox for browsing instead, why would this Application overview exist in the first place?

  • rovanionluckey

    >First off, you cannot categorize perfectly,

    Just because it’s hard to do perfect categorization doesn’t mean having no categories is better than having them. Don’t let the perfect be the enimy of the good.

    > Secondly many Apps can
    belong to two or more categories and that brakes the consistency of the
    system
    Se the first point.

    >Third and more important, systems nowdays are getting quite
    smart to understand what are you looking for using metadata and
    searching optimized algorithms like zeitgeist.

    What says we can’t have both? We did have categories and search for a good while.

    Also it’s extremely unprofessional to write this “news” of yours as if it had already been implemented.

  • Paul B

    + The Applications grid launcher is finally on the edge of the screen where it belongs.
    + This could provide a useful mechanism to users if users could create their own similar pop out directories.- With all of the generic names of Gnome 3 applications and configuration settings and how many applications you can have installed on a desktop system the one view is going to get very large and very hard to find things in very quickly. Using favorites helps, but if you hadn’t noticed there are a lot of games getting released for Linux these days and I don’t really want every single one of those cluttering up my dash bar all the time.- I’m not sure that this is all that discoverable. It isn’t obvious on the dash that its a menu/directory pop out, especially if it represents a unique part of the interface. How about making a visual cue that its different than the rest of the dash, and letting users make pop-out folders that work like this in addition to the launchers in the favorites menu?- The basic grid still has its problems, especially for applications with longer names. How helpful is ‘Advanced Setti…’ going to be with no categories? It could be ‘Advanced Settings’ for Gnome, but how is the user going to know? It could be advanced settings for any application that the user has installed.Why not have the categories remain as ‘section headers’ in the list, and add a ‘recommended’/'frequently used’ list to the top. The current category list isn’t perfect (the clickable area really needs to extend to the edge of the screen), but removing it completely seems like a really bad idea. As a daily user of Gnome 3, I really want to see them remain even if they’re just a way to quickly and automatically scroll to a part of the main scrolling view that’s better than not having them.Also, when a user goes to activities for the first time on a fresh desktop, why not go straight to the applications view?

  • Natem

    Your search isn’t good enough to do this. 

    IN ADDITION TO THIS:

    This is assuming that the end users knows the correct terminology to conjure up the correct application.  You CANNOT assume that they know the names of the applications or that they know the technical terminology behind the application that they are looking for.

    For example a situation I ran into yesterday. I have a friend that wanted a music cd of stuff I listen to on my mp3 player.  They don’t own a mp3 player, but have a cd player in their car, in their kitchen, etc. So I wanted to burn a copy of the music. 

    Now _JUST_TRY_ to do a search that will conjure of ‘Braseo’ other then by application name. Try ‘Audio cd’ or ‘write music’ or any other sort of search that people will typically do in any other search engine in existence.  

    You will never find it. The application might as well not exist. By removing catagories menu you have successfully purged any and all references to Braseo and a dozen other applications from Gnome. They might as well never been written.

    This is a really bad move. Beta versions of Gnome Shell had no application menu. Instead it was just a grid of applications. It made no sense at all and was difficult to find applications. 

    • D798961

       You say you “wanted to burn” a copy of the music. Why don’t you search for “burn”?

      • Bruno Unna

        It doesn’t work, either. I’ve just did it, out of curiosity.

  • natem

    > You are still not convinced?  Think that even on the more complex interface systems like Amazon most of the  users don’t use categories instead they just type on search box.

    Hell. You don’t even know what you are talking about. 

    Search is just one of MANY types of interfaces that Amazon provides. Do you think that they would spend the millions of dollars it takes to provide proper menu navigation of their site if it was useless?  It doesn’t matter AT ALL that ‘most of the users’ ‘most of the time’ use search.  

    This is a really very ignorant statement to make. If this is your reasoning  you really need to take time to reflect on what you are thinking about because you are making huge number of faulty assumptions.

  • anechoic

    grandmaware – meh

  • http://profiles.google.com/mikefreeman1972 Michael Freeman

    I sure hope you’re not ever going to get rid of Gnome fallback, because every time you come out with a new idea for Gnome Shell, it gets less and less usable. Type everything to find a program? Why even have a GUI? Might as well be running in a terminal.

    Getting rid of categories is a BAD idea. You said that “you cannot categorize perfectly.” Well, I cannot organize my sock drawer perfectly, but I’m not going to throw my socks in one giant bin with my shirts and pants and coats, etc., and be expected to find anything efficiently.

    It’s fine to have typing as a way to find programs. That’s at least adding a useful feature. But removing all these features people rely on every day is just asking for hate and negative criticism, and getting less and less support for your product. I LOVED Gnome 2. If Mate were more well-integrated into the system, or Cinnamon didn’t heat up my laptop like a furnace, I would be there. For now, I’m on Gnome Classic/fallback, because it’s at least sane. If that ever gets dropped, there’s gonna be some really choice words spewing from my mouth.

  • V-R

    Another stupid move. Yes, you certainly can’t categorize perfectly. But a (hierarchical) system of categories is invaluable if you don’t know what you should type in that pesky search box and simply want to browse for something. I wouldn’t want my library to abandon its systematization of books, even though they simply could say: “Let’s just order everything by the author’s last name”. That would be quite a mess. Not least categorization represents an important cognitive achievement.

    As imperfect as they may be, categories work. I’m really growing tired of all these “Let’s just search using metadata” types.

  • Crada

    (one year from now, . .)  ”We told you so!”

  • Yaseen Noorani

    I always liked the categories thing. It made it easier when you just want to use the mouse and don’t fee like moving your hands to the keyboard

  • Tacco

    I like it….but i wanna see it in action before judging! Keep up the good job!

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  • goneforgood

    ok, fair enough, but one thing that I would like to know… have you been able to implement preloading the applications? or will I have to hear my hdd scrape together the available applications when I search still? I think that is kinda awkward. Just compare that to any kind of launcher you can imagine… synapse, kupfer, gnome do. even on windows it’s faster when you search for something. so searching is fine. but slow searching sucks.

  • Alcasa

    I think some time ago, there were categories integrated into the applications view. I would have preferred that idea over a complete removal. Especially for cases like Wine, categories provide a cleaner solution. Paired with a reliable menu editor (why not drag and drop in application view?), people could decide themselves were their applications belong to and still have a relatively clutter-free desktop.

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  • Marin Ivanov

    Wrong move I think… I should probably think about making my own overview as an extension.

  • rory

    Amazon is a good example of how categories are needed. I imagine usage of Amazon goes something like:
    search
    view
    see similar items in same category/related category/commonly used.

    So I’d say if categories go, then there needs to be a way to view similar apps.

  • justin

    What happens when you want to use switches to launch apps? GNOME works on unix-like systems, and removing the ability to run a program with a shortcut is very anti-unix.

  • Ade Malsasa Akbar

    I know there is big clash between user and developer. But I’ve inspired by GNOME 3 and create my new blog about Linux future. Especially inspired by GNOME Shell themes. You can visit it linuxdreambox [dot] wordpress [dot] com. Thank you, GNOME 3 community :)