Task Launcher - mockups

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Wednesday 30 January 2013 22:04:16 Marco Martin wrote:
> On Wednesday 30 January 2013, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > On Wednesday 30 January 2013 21:43:13 Marco Martin wrote:
> > > On Wednesday 30 January 2013, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> > > > Attached you'll see my idea for a new task-centric Launch area, in
> > > > which everything is a task, and the categories are verbs (see "select
> > > > task.png").
> > > > Each list would be flickable vertically (I know, this conflicts with
> > > 
> > > hm, no i think any form of vertical flick shouldn't be allowed in the
> > > panel. otherwise you have an area that doesn't always behave the same,
> > > (in general vertical scrolling into something that already scrolls
> > > vertically pretty much means frustration, just look how annoying is when
> > > happens in a website) the panel covering everything (and being the only
> > > piece of ui that modofies everything) must remail very, very easy to
> > > hide (even worse now that dragging works very very badly when done over
> > > the window strip due to a bad x11 limitation, that is probably not
> > > fixable before wayland)
> > 
> > So what did you have in mind when you suggested using the column browser
> > component during the last IRC meeting? That would have required vertical
> 
> i had in mind a completely separed application. yes is a step more but at
> least is not worsening the startup time of tens of seconds and rising of
> several megabites the already unacceptable idle  memory footprint...

Why do you expect integrating the task launcher into the shell to have such a 
big performance/resource impact? From my technical n00b perspective, it is not 
that much different from just having more launchers in there, presented in a 
more sophisticated way...
If my specific UI idea could only be implemented in a resource-heavy way, I'd 
rather try to find a less resource-heavy UI then outsourcing it into a separate 
application. I'm sure we can find a way :)

Plus: I don't think there would be much gain if users started a new 
application every time they start a task. We want to make tasks the 
centerpiece of working with PA, so users would have to run that application 
very often. Then we'd have shorter startup, but waiting time every time users 
want to start a new task, which to me looks like a worse situation.

> > scrolling as well, wouldn't it?
> > I agree that this would be far from ideal, though. Another approach could
> > be to wrap categories with too many items into multiple columns. That way
> > we could avoid vertical scrolling, but would introduce more horizontal
> > scrolling, of course. Maybe that would be the lesser of two evils,
> > though...
> 
> 2-3 horizontal scrolling strips would be already better i think...

I can't picture what you mean by "2-3 horizontal scrolling strips". Do you 
mean only using 2-3 categories overall?