I have spent the last few weeks using Gnome as my primary desktop to see what they are doing. One interesting thing they did was to put the panel at the top of the screen and the taskbar on the bottom. I couldn't figure out why I like it until about an hour ago when it hit me. In the top left of the panel the two menu's are text, not icons.
| Applications | Actions |
No big deal right? Well because they are text they are only 16 pixels tall. having a 16x16 size icon for your Start Menu (the thing you will go to all the time presumably) just sucks. It is way too small to easily reach, but having text that is 16x200 suddenly it becomes very usable. It stands out vs the other application shortcuts. Why I tried to do this in KDE I found myself not happy with the results. The KStart icon got lost among the dozen other icons, it didn't stand out and was harder to hit with the mouse.
One thing I never liked was the amount of screen space my kde panel/taskbar would waste. This was mostly due to the fact that it ran the whole length of the screen. To prove that I can run it at half width and center it in the middle of the screen and it is just fine with no squishing, but then I waste space on either side.
Now I am not saying that this is how kde should do it or anything. I am simply pointing out one thing that Gnome did that I really liked, but took me three weeks to figure out why.
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Something similar already suggested
See http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=9183 for some mockups and http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69348 for the corresponding bug report with some feedbacks from the developers.
me has this too
I use a similair setup:
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/jospoortvliet/pictures/latest.jpg
I think its very nice, and an improvement over the current kicker. When KDE 3.4 is there, the kicker-wastebin will be bottom-right, of course. And if the Kmenu (and probably several, like actions, most used apps, and locations) would be available as text instead of button, I'd use that (so I could make the top kicker panel smaller).
The nice thing also is that if there would be some nice kicker applets (I'm looking for a search-applet and/or a BasKet applet, check http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=21162 ) there is still space left, on the right or left of the current command bar. of course, such applets won't really work if the top bar would be very small (as it would if there are text menu's instead of the current buttons). but now, there is a lot space wasted, so I'd rather have text menu's - as long as these applets don't exist...
A bit fake
I've always thought those two text menu entries in Gnome a bit fake. People who've never used a Mac but seen screenshots think "Wow! Menu on top! Gnome is just like OS X! Cool! Usable!"... And when I gave Ubuntu and Gnome a try, I found that I didn't use those menus all that much.
Yes and no :)
Yes, this is one of the things in GNOME which really does work very nicely. When that is said, here's how my desktop currently looks: http://leinir.homeip.net/~leinir/gallery/index.php?image=pictures/amarok-shot.jpg. The taskbar at the bottom is actually due to an inconsistency not being fixed (use your scrollwheel over any of the taskbar buttons with more than one task in and you will be scrolling through those windows.. you'd expect the Window List button, featured in the top right corner on this screenshot, to do the same.. Sorry, nope).
What is important here is that while you do indeed have a point that something as small as 16x16 pixels is very small and seemingly difficult to hit, it has to be said as well that if one of those 256 pixels is the top left pixel of the screen, for example, then it suddenly becomes one of the four pixels on the screen that's easiest to hit. That was the idea behind my current layout.. Things are clustered around the top and bottom edges of the screen so as to make them easy to hit, simply by slapping the mouse. No need to position the cursor precisely in more than one dimension
But yes, there are a few things to be learnt from GNOME. Not so many, because the work-flow concepts in GNOME are different for the most part, but there are definitely some).
Are you using kde-3.3.x? I ha
Are you using kde-3.3.x? I had a similar setup with the menu in the top kicker, but since >=3.3.92 this setup doesn't work anymore. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong?
Nope :)
Nope, 3.4 RC1. The thing is, the way the menu is done now, you can't put in in the main panel any more. The way you do it is, put your main panel at the bottom and turn on the desktop menu. Then add the applets you'd normally have in the main panel to the panel with the menu in. Then remove everything from the main panel and just add a taskbar to the main panel. Hey presto, my setup
(By the way, I had to update my kicker to CVS to make the menu behave... Of course it still thinks it's in an RTL environment, but Aaron assured me that the menu behaviour will be all fixed by 3.4 final
)
thanks,
got the menu working with your help!
Let's hope the remaining glitches are fixed in 3.4.0 final 
It has still some strange behaviour (how do I align it to the left?) but at least it is working now