Gregory's ServerThe activities indicator has landed 🚀
Thanks to @verdre for the prototype extension, Georges for implementing it in a clean way, and @fmuellner for timely reviews!
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/2902
Tobias Bernard
7 comments
Tobias Bernard
A few months ago I stumbled across this extension (https://www.omglinux.com/space-bar-gnome-extension), 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:
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:
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.
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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XufZ_sa3u1s Kudos to everyone involved in designing, developing, and landing this on time 🙌 |
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: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/3590