Since I own a Sony TZ laptop, and it has a wide screen monitor, I’m worried about vertical screen space. I’ve been blogging about that before. Now I found a hack that might help a bit. There is a thing called Global Menu for Gnome.
It kills the menu in the window and puts in it an applet in a Gnome panel. The idea is stolen from Apple, but it’s a good idea I think. It removes the completely useless line in each window. Now all that has to be removed ins the titlebar, then I’ll be even more happy with the interface.
Now the weak thing: I haven’t tried the global menu yet. I don’t want to kill my Ubuntu immediately after installing Intrepid. I want to create a VM with Intrepid and try it out there. It will take some time, but I’ll post the result here.
GUI, Ubuntu
Gnome global menu, GUI, Ubuntu
I’m rather surprised that a lot of desktop solutions still use a huge amount of vertical space on the screen. Especially since most monitors are more wide then high. Why isn’t it possible to put a lot of toolbars and related stuff (menus, status bars) on the side of windows?
There is a nice little Firefox plugin that helps a bit: TinyMenu. It’s pretty good, it decreases the Firefox menu to a single entry so that you can combine it with other entries on a toolbar. It saves my 1 toolbar vertical screen real estate.
GUI, Ubuntu
GUI, rant, Ubuntu
Some people can be so right: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-makes-design-googley.html
Designers can learn a lot from the simple rules mentioned in the article. I strongly believe that a lot of website die because there are little really good designers.
Opinion
GUI, web design
Why is AWN such a crap product. It looks beautiful, but it crashes, the UI is hopeless and some stuff just doesn’t work. I really don’t understand why it seems to be so complicated to create a dock for linux that just works. Is that really so hard to do?
A dock should work like AWN, but then not show the stuff that AWN shows when you startup. The notification area should look a bit better then it does now. The hide/show should work, can somebody think what should happen when you open a menu or popup (the terminal popup is great) and the dock hides? Should the dock even hide then? It should be possible to put the dock on the upper, left and right part of the screen.
All pretty basic stuff, but it seems our coding friends out there can’t get it done. I hope they will at some point, because the Gnome panel is worthless and it’s time for something new. Until then I’ll have to live with AWN.
GUI, Linux
AWN, GUI, Linux