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Tobias Bernard

The activities indicator has landed 🚀

Thanks to @verdre for the prototype extension, Georges for implementing it in a clean way, and @fmuellner for timely reviews!

gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-s

Screenshot of a nested GNOME Shell session in a floating window. The nested session has a plain blue background and a small terminal window is open on the current workspace. The top bar has the new workspace indicator on the left side. It consists of small, dimmed dots for the inactive workspace, and a larger, longer pill for the active workspace.
19 Aug 2023 at 18:20 | Open on mastodon.social
7 comments
Tobias Bernard

A bit of history, as a curiosity: We've long wanted to replace the Activities button with something nicer, but finding a good replacement proved difficult given the constraints (e.g. needs wide enough to be clickable and generic enough to stand for searching, switching, launching, etc).

This old issue has a bunch of random ideas for alternatives: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-s

19 Aug 2023 at 18:30 | Open on mastodon.social
Andrey Sitnik

@tbernard wow! so want to see it in GNOME 45!

19 Aug 2023 at 18:32 | Open on mastodon.social
Tobias Bernard

A few months ago I stumbled across this extension (omglinux.com/space-bar-gnome-e), which sparked the idea of having a dynamic indicator rather than just a static icon.

We used the extension for some very hacky experiments, e.g. this from @cassidy:

Screenshot of the top left part of the GNOME Shell overview. The activities button is replaced by 5 dots, representing workspaces. The active workspace is a wide pill with a thin border, while the inactive ones are dimmed circles. This was hackily put together by using the Space Bar extension in an, uh, unconventional way by Cassidy.
19 Aug 2023 at 18:33 | Open on mastodon.social
Tobias Bernard

This seemed promising enough that @verdre built a proper extension for it, which implements the exact visuals and behavior we wanted (though still very hacky code-wise).

This is what we showed off during the design state of the union talk at GUADEC:

19 Aug 2023 at 18:40 | Open on mastodon.social
Tobias Bernard

We used this extension to extensively test the behavior, both on ourselves (by daily driving it) and as part of a series of informal user interviews.

One interesting learning from those interviews was that for a lot of people "abstract symbol I don't know" intuitively translates to "menu".

Even though the indicator doesn't have a direct reference to "apps", people tended to click the pill in the top left without thinking when asked to launch apps, since it looked like a menu to them.

19 Aug 2023 at 18:45 | Open on mastodon.social
Tobias Bernard

Finally, Georges Stavracas saved the day by doing a clean implementation (including the necessary underlying plumbing) at the very tail end of the 45 development cycle! Technically we're already past UI freeze, but we got a freeze break.

The last part of the development was done on a stream yesterday: youtube.com/watch?v=XufZ_sa3u1

Kudos to everyone involved in designing, developing, and landing this on time 🙌

19 Aug 2023 at 18:52 | Open on mastodon.social
Nima Fanniasl :yay: :linux:
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