Feature in Focus

Activities Multitasking

Current State

GNOME Shell's Activities Overview is too barren and underutilized. Activities are linear in a "one at a time" workflow found in mobile interfaces. This workflow doesn't work for desktops and hurts productivity and awareness. This needs to be fixed and is the primary critical flaw in the current GNOME Shell design. Ideally the Overview should be a busy, active and powerful dashboard area. Think of a jet airplane cockpit with dozens of controls. Users should feel in control of their systems and have a frictionless non-linear workflow. They should be able accomplish complex tasks without having their awareness interrupted or constrained.

Change

My solution to this problem is to take a lesson from tiling window managers. Instead of having a linear sequence all items in the Activities Overview should be tiled and present simultaneously. This finally allows full true multitasking. Items from the various menus can be dragged and dropped in other areas enabling useful shortcuts to common tasks.

xmonad tiling manager

xmonad tiling wm

Sketches

Feel free to put your own sketches or mock-ups here just follow the format used here...

AlexGS

overview in browse mode

The example above shows the default view in "browse mode". Search mode as seen below and only activated when the user types something into the search box.

overview in browse mode

Notice that everything is laid out in a very strict grid. The only elements that scale are the Window Picker views when the work-space becomes loaded with windows. This makes the Overview both solid and predictable.

Widgets

  • Items in the Overview would be treated as widgets and by hitting shift + right click the user can open a small configuration menu for each with options. These widgets could then be placed within "tiles" in the Overview and moved around or even scaled.
  • Tiles spaces would also be re-sizable as well.
  • The "widget" user-configuration functionality would really help extension writers because that functionality would already be built in so when new widgets are created via extensions they wouldn't have to rewrite their own methods.
  • Potential widget ideas:
    • Terminal search widget that searches all open terminals and returns a text result.
    • Background services widget that shows active background services with status items per service and even some simple action items.

Examples

Please feel free to provide any relevant examples of multitasking you might find in this section. It will provide some additional ideas and implementations to look at. Just be sure to follow the format described below.

Desktop

Microsoft

Windows XP

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Windows 7

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Google

Chrome OS

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Apple

Mac OS X

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Mobile

Google

Android

Phone
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Tablet
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Apple

iOS

Phone
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Tablet
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Discussion

Any comments please tell!

AlexGS/Research/ShellMultitasking (last edited 2014-02-18 12:55:13 by AlexGS)