The new animated Gnome3 modals

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

When I reviewed the Gnome Files 3.5.4 I guess not many people noticed that the modal dialog of Files had a new position somewhere on the middle of the parent window instead on top.

I also YouTube-d the Gnome Control Center 3.5.4 to show you the fancy new transitions.

It seems that these two technologies becoming one and we get some animated modals.

version-files — The modal dialog in Files 3.5.4

Transitions are probably the best way to trace the state of the current, next and previous position in a visual workflow. A dummy example: closing and minimizing a window would be impossible to comprehend the difference without the appropriate animations. Same goes for flip-book, carousel and you can make thousand examples of this. You understand, right?

Gnome3 as for now uses transitions in Mutter only. This will definitely change in 3.6 that all Gnome apps will gain some “moves”. Jakub Steiner has done the first blenders in an experimental window (this is not the real Settings!).

Use HD!

Jakub shortly explained us the changes: “The transition introduces the modal and makes it clear which window it belongs to. The reason why we changed the modals is that they don’t currently look as appropriate with maximized windows“.

I want to add that transitions except the practical use are nice optically as long as remain low profile without distracting the user. And Gnome has succeed that.

This video was originally @http://jimmac.fedorapeople.org/gnome3/newmodals.webm but I had to upload it in YouTube to embed here.

LorgnocOspYe

This is great! The debute of attached modal dialogs in GNOME 3.0 was a great improvement: no more frustrating situation of dialog being left open with unfinished action, “out of sight, out of mind”.

But the implemented metaphor of the dialog rolling out of the window titlebar, borrowed from Mac OS X, doesn’t really make sense, because the dialog can be larger and/or taller than the window it comes from. The open/save as dialog was the usual offender.

But the titlebar of the “About” dialog in the screenshot still looks very much like the previous design, despite its centered position. I hope it gets the rounded corners and flatter look of the mockup before the next release. The animation too, if possible, but the dialog needs to look good on a screenshot before looking good on a screencast. :P
Guest

Why the dialog comes from nothing (see the show animation) and goes to the upper side (see the hidde animation)? Thats makes no sense…

http://profiles.google.com/misterpah misterpah pah

yeah! in my humble knowledge about UX, the animation should show that it(the dialog) came from the current application. a TV-in animation should be accompanied by the TV-out animation