Ambiance theme for GNOME-Shell

Gnome-Shell may be heading in a different direction given the recent delays and new unity-esque mock-ups shown at Guadec but one thing is for sure: the current darkly-toned look Shell rocks out with is not to everyone's tastes.

Themeing Shell

With some tweaking and a bit of CSS users can customize Shell. There are limitations, particularly surrounding gradients and translucency, but  with an idea, patience and some hard-work you can quickly knock Shell into shape.

Below a preview of an ‘Ambience’ style Shell theme by designer ~half-left.

The design isn’t complete just yet but the CSS style will be available to download as soon it is. Check it out in more detail, fave it and comment on it @ half-left.deviantart.com/art/GNOME-Shell-Ambiance-Theme

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Proposal to make GNOME a fully-fledged OS

Last weeks GUADEC was less like a developers conference and more like a presidential campaign rally! The enthusiasm, positivity and general feedback that it has garnered is incredible but amongst the many interesting things propositioned at GUADEC came the idea of a GNOME as an OS.

“Linux as implementation detail..”

Using his Guadec speech, Red Hat’s Jon McCann put forward the notion of Gnome as an OS rather than, as it currently is, a collection of projects, tool sets and platform upon which other distributions and developers build upon. Various distributions customize the default Gnome desktop to differing degrees.

“What matters is what we expose to the user and the developer.” starts John McCann in a post on his blog today. “I propose that we take notes from Android, WebOS, Meego, and others and consider Linux an implementation detail and start to define the OS as we see fit.”

This certainly iterates Mark Shuttleworth's recent thoughts on ‘tribalism’ between distributions and whilst working towards a common “monolithic” desktop in terms of UI, developer experience and application ecosystem would consolidate a lot of work that currently happens amongst distributions it should be noted that many recent technologies developed by Canonical/Ubuntu have been declined, passed over & rejected by Gnome with the latter preferring to create similar tools/features from scratch.

The success of a ‘Gnome OS’ would undoubtedly hinge, to some degree, on the level of cooperation between the two companies.

Super thanks to Brian Fleeger

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The new Gnome-Shell mock-up in motion

The “new” style GNOME Shell mock-up presented at last weeks Guadec conference now comes with added motion! The following video demos the intended motion-design of the layout so whilst what you see below is not a screencast of current functionality it is a pretty slick design nonetheless.

 

Thanks to Alex

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GNOME 3 delayed until March 2011

The release of GNOME 3 has been delayed once again, this time proposed for release in March of 2011.

The news, announced at GUADEC, is to allow the GNOME team 'another release cycle to mature' the first major overhaul the GNOME desktop has seen for many, many years.

In a press release posted on the official GNOME website GNOME said "we feel that our users and downstream community are better served by holding the GNOME 3.0 release until March 2011. This gives adequate time not only for feature development, but user feedback and testing."

GNOME releases are targeted at every six months in order to provide a reliable and stable platform for users and developers. As such GNOME 2.32 will ship in September 'along with a preview release of GNOME 3.0.'

"GNOME 2.32 will still have a number of interesting new features such as color management and UPnP support as well as the usual performance enhancements and bug fixes that have marked GNOME's timed releases for years." the press release assures.

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I know I'm in no position to criticise but really GNOME, really? (d0od rant)

With Gnome 3.0 on course to be released later this year developers have begun making the tough decisions on what will be included as part of the desktop - and, perhaps more controversially, what won’t be.

One major component that won’t be making it into the revamped release of the GNOME Desktop is Gnome Activity Journal - The Zeitgeist toting tool that allows users to search their files and user data intelligently using timelines, tags and other ‘meta’ relationships.

This has somewhat taken me aback as, to my mind at least, GAJ was very much in the vein of Gnome 3.0’s etho’s and vision; making the desktop and user data easier to manage, sort and access. The ‘plan’ for GNOME 3.0 states that a core aspect is: -

“Changing the way we access documents (via a journal, like GNOME Zeitgeist): having to deal with a filesystem in their daily work is not what makes users happy -- on the contrary, they generally just want to access their documents and not to browse their hard disk. Providing new solutions to this problem (using timelines, tags, bookmarks, etc.) is something that has been of interest in our community for a long time, but we never completely jumped in. We simply should.”

Why was it removed? In the words of GNOME release manager Vincent Untz it needs “…more integration with the rest of the desktop and the overall Gnome design.” . Another meek reason offered up was that “it feels too much like a standalone application.”

GAJ does feel different to other GNOME applications that I've tried partly because it is a different breed of application. Perhaps from technical and adherence guidelines there may be some discrepancies with GAJ in GNOME but surely what GAJ has to offer users far outweighs any quibbles on it not blending in enough? I am not a developer and, having aggrieved upstream once already this week, I’ll just sigh loudly at this decision and move on.

On the flip side, showing that wacky decisions are clearly the order of the day in GNOME dev land, the awesome visually-rich Clutter library was also rejected, this time on the grounds that there are still outstanding copyright issues rather than that it isn’t conformist enough. (Sorry, did that sound bitter?). This reason is pretty sound all things granted and the development team are hoping the situation can be resolved.

Most significantly was that Gnome Shell has been approved meaning GNOME 3 will be breaking with the traditional desktop model and introduce the oft-criticised but highly anticipated new method of managing windows and applications.

I’m excited for the direction GNOME 3 is taking, if not slightly annoyed that some salient opportunities to really enhance the desktop experience are being squandered.

Gnome 3.0 is scheduled for release in September this year.

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The Future Of Nautilus

Nautilus – the default file manager in Ubuntu – has an interface many consider to be awful and overly complex.

It has button after button, toolbar after toolbar, menu after menu – and just looks, in my opinion at least, clunky.

Ian “ Izo” Cylkowski also thinks that Nautilus could do with a makeover and has gone a step further and produced some mock-ups detailing his vision for the file browser.

Boy does it scream ‘Yes!!’

To get to his design, Cylkowski deconstructed the current Nautilus, highlighti ng its replicated buttons and superfluous menus.

It’s well worth reading the whole thing over at his site @ http://www.design-by-izo.com/2010/02/27/deconstructing-nautilus-and-rebuilding-it-better/ although a brief summary is below.

1. Arrows replicate functionality provided by pathbar. Would be more ‘elegant’ to have their feature merged into a right click on back/forward buttons.
2. ‘Parent Folder’ button replicates functionality provided by pathbar.
3. Stop buttons is useless – file browsers load instantly.
4. Reload could be integrated into pathbar
5. Home button is already on sidebar.
6. Computer button should also be on sidebar.
7. Search should be a text entry field.
8. Make the pathbar sexy.
9. Zoom could be better implemented (like Nautilus Elementary’s slider)
10. Buttons would work better than drop down list; a-la OS X finder.

His resulting mock-up is worthy of an OMG!

He even goes one better by proposing that GNOME Activity Journal – which uses Zeitgeist to display a log of your recent file activity – would make more sense as part of Nautilus rather than a standalone application.

Seeing it in mock-up it’s hard to disagree!

Get it now (sorta.)

Cylkowski does reference the awesome work of DanRabbit’s Nautilus-Elementary. Better still Nautilus-Elementary can be installed today!

Install Nautilus-Elementary [Karmic only]

Open a terminal and type the following commands, hitting your return/enter key after each.

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:am-monkeyd/nautilus-elementary-ppa
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get upgrade

Then either log out and back in to use the new Nautilus or manually do it by pressing Alt+F2 and typing: -

• pkill nautilus

Now we need to launch nautilus, so press Alt+F2 again, this time entering: -

• nautilus

To hide/show the "menu bar" as in the screenshot hit Alt+M. To toggle the sidebar use 'F9'.

Future of Nautilus-Elementay

DanRabbit’s vision for Nautilus-Elementary is not too dissimilar to that of Ian Cylkowski’s: -

We’ve already seen Nautilus-Elementary get CoverFlow-esque integration: -

And you needn't worry about losing the ability to 'type' in the pathbar either, as DanRabbit's vision has that covered in spectacular style: -

Practical future: Lucid, GNOME 3 and beyond

Leaving the land of mock-ups and 3rd party win, what IS Nautilus going to look like in the future?

Requiring almost no squinting in our crystal ball, Nautilus in Lucid already sees some minor, subtle changes.

• Tabs have been moved to the bottom
• Split-pane view has been implemented
• Toolbars have been slightly rearranged with the ‘Places’ sitting in the pathbar and ‘View’ and ‘Zoom’ jumping up to the main toolbar.
• Un-mounting a device now returns you to ‘Computer’

Split pane view in Nautilus 2.29

GNOME 3

GNOME 3 will see nautilus become solely a file manager. “What?” you ask. Currently Nautilus provides several parts of the GNOME desktop including your actual ‘desktop’. With GNOME 3 Nautilus will be relegated to simply being a file manager – making swapping it out for an alternative a breeze.

Although noting concrete has been built – or even decided on – yet last weeks GNOME usability hackfest in London threw up some tantalizing glimpses into what’s being proposed.

Behold the whiteboard of divination: -

Máirín Duffy posted the above image and some notes on the discussion of Nautilus from the hackfest on her blog - which I've shamelessly pillaged and pasted below.

Head on over to her blog for even more juice on GNOME 3 from the week-long discussion.

• remove combo box to change nautilus view, just use menu?
• frustration that nautilus is becoming like midnight commander, not beautiful to use, too complicated
• dont like split pane idea, why not use two windows? split-pane seems universally disliked by GNOME designers.
• snap to side-by-side like in windows 7 would be good and would remove need for split-pane.
• search in nautilus sucks
• confusion between magnifying glass icon for search vs zoom
• Things to consider removing from ui:
  • zoom controls
  • tabs
• Things to add to ui
  • undo
  • search folders
  • sharing / collaboration – share with
  • context-sensitive actions toolbar

Convergence

A lot of the discussions for GNOME 3’s direction tie in wonderfully with the proposed directions offered up by Elementary and Izo.

It seems the future of Nautilus has its bearing set firmly in the direction of awesome.

Thanks to leo

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A Few New Features In Gnome-Shell

GNOME-Shell needs no introduction. I’m sure many of you all know what it is, have opinions on it and probably you will have tried it out.

But have you tried it out lately?

Progress

OMG! contributor om26er took the daily build of GNOME-Shell for a spin and found some nice new features. You can click on all images below to view them larger.

Notifications

GNOME-Shell brings with it its own set of notifications. (What was wrong with Ubuntu’s?) For example, when a track changes in Rhythmbox a ‘notification’ appears on the bottom.

Hovering your mouse over this notification enlarges it and shows more info, including ‘actionable’ options. (In this case ‘next’)

Here are the notifications in action with Pidgin

Workspaces

In the ‘Applications’ section of the side pane you can see difference in ‘highlighting’ your applications running and those favourited but not running.

A new method of moving between workspaces in GNOME-Shell has been introduced. Note the scroll bar and ‘workspace’ icons.

Although you can still use the old ‘expose’ mode.

 

Try it out via a PPA

You can install the daily-builds of GNOME-Shell – and thus poke around with all the latest developments and bugs – via the following PPA. There are builds for Karmic and Lucid: -

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ricotz/testing
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

OMG! WHAT’S THAT WALLPAPER???

It’s a proposed wallpaper for Lucid. We blogged about it a few days back. Get it here.

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A Quick Look At Gnome 3’s Desktop Sidebar

Continuing our look at Gnome 3’s Gnome-Shell, we land upon the oft unnoticed desktop sidebar!

The sidebar can be enable/disabled from the user menu in the top right-hand corner and unless clicked or hovered over, sits flush against the left hand side of the desktop.

These pictures are a bit small, so here is the sidebar enlarged:

Annoyingly, the application shortcuts in the sidebar aren’t customizable. I couldn’t find anyway of removing or adding my own.

Hovering over the ‘recent documents’ tab provides a quick pop out overview of said items: -

Currently there doesn’t seem to be anyway to change the location of the sidebar, either.

This will be a big bug bear for a lot of people, however there is a reason it’s on the left and that’s because it’s considered (in terms of user interface design) the easiest point to get to as well as being looked at more often due to the fact we read left – right.

Useful or in the way?

The sidebar is disabled by default in current builds of Gnome-Shell (Gnome 3’s new interface) and i think there may be a reason for that: It’s borderline pointless. By the time it takes to shuffle your mouse over to the sidebar you could nudge it up to the top left and get a greater variety of options and files.

As with most things time is a great decider, so the more i sit with the sidebar the more i may come to appreciate it. As for now – it’s staying disabled.

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Gnome 3 – A Quick Visual Tour

Gnome 3, which will be available to install in Ubuntu 10.04, will mark the first radical change to the Gnome Desktop since it's inception, thanks to it’s “new” interface ‘Gnome-Shell’.

Doing Things Better

On first glance, the Gnome 3 Desktop doesn't seem all that different from the current default Gnome set-up.

(note: click on the pictures to view them larger.)

You’ll notice there is no bottom taskbar and the top panel has been rearranged somewhat. It also has, in place of the Ubuntu System Menu, an ‘Activities’ button… 

Activities – Making Things Easier To Manage

Pressing ‘Activities’ takes you into an ‘Overview’ mode. It’s from here that you can open new applications, add or remove workspaces, move windows between workspaces and navigate through your recent files.

 

You can easily find an application or document by typing it’s name in the search box. This will instantly show the list of matches beneath it.

You can also launch applications by clicking ‘browse’ and navigating the category lists – very similar to the current system menu applet.

Adding workspaces is simple. You just click on the circular add button in the bottom right-hand corner and a new workspace appears.

Similarly you can remove workspaces by clicking the circular minus button that is over-layed in the centre of a workspace in the overview mode.

Moving applications to a different workspace is as logical as just dragging them between panes!

It is the “basics” of this workflow which, in my opinion from the time I've spent using Gnome-Shell, truly enhance the usability factor in this new “desktop” metaphor.

Sadly, Compiz and Gnome-Shell don’t play nice, however this doesn’t mean the end of eye-candy effects as gnome-Shell has slick animations all of it’s own thanks to Clutter!

Quick 45sec demo: -

HTML5 (Flash Free) Version: -

I’m really excited at the new possibilities that gnome-shell and gnome-3 will take the desktop in.

Change my dear .. and it seems not a moment too soon!

~ Sixth Doctor

Also:

Read about Gnome 3’s (slightly pointless) desktop sidebar @ http://omgubuntu.co.uk/2009/09/gnome-3s-sidebar.html

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