Comments on: Removal of Categories in Gnome Shell? Won’t happen!

By: GSoC brings Pagination in Shell Overview | woGue

GSoC brings Pagination in Shell Overview | woGue — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:46:12 +0000

[...] of the most controversial features that is being discussed since Gnome Shell 3.4 is back again through the ideas page of this year’s Google Summer of Code. Pagination [...]

By: Remove features with removal extensions | woGue

Remove features with removal extensions | woGue — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 16:49:26 +0000

[...] Categories” and I suppose that you can easily imagine what it does. People went crazy when pagination on Gnome Shell was to replace categories, but I suppose that there are some users out there that don’t even need pagination dots on [...]

By: oystercatcher

oystercatcher — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 19:45:00 +0000

I have been using redhat/fedora since rh 5.0 and it has improved significantly with time.
I dont use any extensions but I do disable the top left hot mouse corner as it drives me
crazy.

Looking forward to trying out fedora on the raspberry pi when I finally get it.

By: ScionicSpectre

ScionicSpectre — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 00:26:00 +0000

Ah, we’ll see what happens with those themes. I’ll certainly take a look, thanks for the pointer. :)

By: alex285

alex285 — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 00:17:00 +0000

I meant for GTK3 and GS. If you do some Node.js or Rails, they have already drop CSS. But anyway check it if you do web-devel anyway!

By: ScionicSpectre

ScionicSpectre — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 00:03:00 +0000

I’ve contributed artwork to a variety of open source projects, so it will be nice to get something upstream that will be useful to me on a daily basis. Since GTK 2′s features are stable and aren’t likely to change, the existing engines should do the job. Of course, we have discussed making an Adwaita engine for GTK 2, and I’ve personally thought a lot about making a CSS-compatible engine that could work in various toolkits (think QtCurve).

However, with our resources the pixmap theme with gtkrc is the most viable solution. Also, I’ll have to research these alternatives to CSS. I suppose I’ve been so spoiled by CSS in web development that I never really thought of an alternative.

By: alex285

alex285 — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 23:49:00 +0000

I found you on Deviant, so the first thing was to check gnome-themes Git :)
Btw as a small suggestion, it would be better if you could use some robust CSS engine. I think CSS should be dropped from Gnome for STYLUS or SCSS or anything similar. CSS is the cancer of Web, don’t bring that mess in Gnome!
Well, good luck with your new “career”!

By: ScionicSpectre

ScionicSpectre — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 23:34:00 +0000

Ah, I didn’t notice you were that alex. I’m a fairly new contributor, but I’ve been up to date on the design team’s work and try to contribute to discussions and advocate for GNOME as best I can. As such, I really do appreciate the work you’re doing with this blog, since otherwise many people might be uninformed as what goes on in GNOME.

Aside from reporting design-related bugs, I’ve been working with Cosimo on a new, more consistent GTK 2 theme for Adwaita we’re hoping to include in 3.6. That’s the extent of my involvement at the moment.

By: alex285

alex285 — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 23:26:00 +0000

In my case you better postponed it, otherwise I’ll get humiliate for printing this :)
May I ask who are you? Your Jack G? Because you’re using “we”, but I couldn’t find you in Gnome people.

By: ScionicSpectre

ScionicSpectre — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 23:11:00 +0000

Well, it’s probably for the best. We did a heck of a lot this cycle to begin with, and the categories work well enough for now. Better to have a complete feature by the release than cram in something that’s difficult to debug in time.

By: alex285

alex285 — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 22:57:00 +0000

I asked him two days ago because any change wasn’t on Git and there is feature freeze in 10 days. He said that pagination won’t happen but the new app launcher will. Next day I saw his push on Gnome-Shell-Design with the pagination draw, so I asked him again and he said more or less what you said. They need to make some improvements first.
I hope that is the final scenario :)

By: ScionicSpectre

ScionicSpectre — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 22:45:00 +0000

Oh, in that case it must be correct. He was in the channel when we were discussing it two days ago, so I guess they must’ve decided to delay the feature. It may be because we were discussing how to make the feature more presentable, and those modifications wouldn’t be ready in time or something.

Did he say anything specific about why? Either way, thanks for the correction.

By: ScionicSpectre

ScionicSpectre — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 21:53:00 +0000

The idea is that you would more likely just wack the corner than click it (easier than GNOME 2′s menus), and search for the application you want (easier again). For a long time before GNOME 3 was around, people used GNOME-Do and similar applications very often to do these things. If you do want to look through all of your applications, you do have to reach a little further, but the hope is that you’d be favoriting or searching for common applications so this happens less frequently. This also gives you a larger target, making it easier to select an option once you find it.

By the way, it’s upper left, then lower left, and we are going forward with pagination because categories were becoming incredibly inefficient and confusing, as you’ve noted. It will work well on a touch-screen, and for mice you can simply scroll.

By: alex285

alex285 — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 21:50:00 +0000

I got this info from Jakub yesterday. Twice. Can you please confirm?

By: ScionicSpectre

ScionicSpectre — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 21:45:00 +0000

Sorry to say, but this video’s a little old. I was just talking about pagination on the IRC channel the other day about this feature, and it seems we were going forward with it for 3.6. I haven’t heard any word on the feature being rescinded.

By: Jrodd

Jrodd — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 00:12:00 +0000

I’m glad they decided to keep categories. (for now lol)
But I really like the idea of having apps you are able to move around and place (Like Google Chrome or like in iOS or Launchpad)
Is this being considered? So far Gnome and Unity don’t really have it. But it seem like a cool Idea.

By: liam

liam — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 19:44:00 +0000

About the “hard click target” of tabs, why aren’t they worried about the tiny click targets of the gear, and back/forwards buttons? The last two are genuinely hard to target.

By: liam

liam — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 05:38:00 +0000

This is fantastic news! Dropping categories never made sense.
On my phone I have tons of apps and trying to find what I want is a huge pain (wel, i twas…recenrlty I just created foldere for each category and that is so much faster).
I hope this sort of conpromise is a positive sign of things to come.

By: Denis

Denis — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 04:38:00 +0000

I do agree that the app icon has to be on the very top of the dash. Also i think dash is doubling the app launcher’s functions. What we can do here is to change the app dash functionality to sort of category/lens dash. Starts with: (1) Activities {that will show all the active apps} (2)Apps {all apps/after pressing the apps icon our dash extends and shows the category of the apps} (3)Recently used {including apps, documents, web pages} (4)Frequently Used {including apps, documents, web pages} (5)Favorites {including apps, documents, web pages} (6)Custom dash/lens
I don’t see a problem here at all. Why people are whining all the time about flaws in design and stuff like that?? “I dont like this, it was better like that” Firstly is free. If you will pay i understand why, but since its free and no laptop afaik comes preinstalled with gnome shell, i asume those people installed themself the de, nobody forced them to. ok? great. Now shut up and take it as it is. No DE is perfect, including OSX or whatever is there. And if you would like to change something, learn how to freaking code and help the community and make things happen. Maybe its rude?? IDK. The only thing i know that i like this website, i do like gnome shell, i do like open source..i do like FREEDOM.

By: Cliff Wells

Cliff Wells — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 20:54:00 +0000

I can see how this would work really well for a tablet/phone (you could use both thumbs to navigate quickly), but yes, it’s an absolutely horrible way to navigate with a mouse or touchpad.