On Sat, Dec 20, 2014 at 7:08 PM, Donato Marrazzo <donato.marra...@gmail.com> wrote: > Top Bar: unfortunately somebody decided that 16/9 screen are good not just > for TV but even for PC and Tablets (very very bad idea). What do you think > to save vertical space using a side bar?
Not much, to be honest. It is true that vertical space is more precious than horizontal space with widescreen resolutions, but there are other factors that need to be considered. In particular, rotating text affects its readability, and most scripts do use a horizontal layout[0]. This matters less for a fixed string like "Activities" because the user will eventually recognize it without actually reading it, but it is a concern for varying elements like the date and application title. Both of those concerns could be considered at the same time by keeping text laid out horizontally in a sidebar, but at least IMHO, this would take away a disproportional amount of horizontal space (27px vertical space vs. >= 150px horizontal space). It is also worth noting that none of the major user interfaces uses a vertical pattern here (at least by default) - Windows, Mac OS, KDE, XFCE and even Unity (with its declared goal of preserving vertical space) all use a horizontal bar at the top or bottom. > Window Title bars when maximized: for the same reason, please save space! If you are talking about removing the titlebar altogether for maximized windows (à la maximus/Unity) rather than reducing padding/spacing in the default theme, then no. This was discussed at length in the past, but there was consensus that the result was pretty poor for applications that were not designed with this pattern in mind (in particular menubars); that's why it was made opt-in by applications[1], and later evolved into GTK+'s client-side decorations, where merging titlebar, menubar and toolbar into a single element saves more vertical space than simply removing the titlebar would[2] - regardless of the window state. Obviously none of this helps with applications that are not adopting any of those patterns, but after discarding removing the titlebar for all windows (as explained above), there's nothing we can do on the GNOME side - we are not a distributor like Canonical, so patching Qt, LibreOffice, Firefox etc. to merge a window's menubar with the top bar (at least when maximized) is simply not possible. That said, I would probably take a patch for an option to force the hide-titlebar-when-maximized property for all (server-side decorated) windows, but it won't be the default. [0] True for Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew; looking at http://www.baidu.com/, it appears to be at least acceptable for Chinese as well ... [1] https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkWindow.html#gtk-window-set-hide-titlebar-when-maximized [2] http://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/08/27/gnome-design-saving-you-space-since-2009-or-so/ _______________________________________________ gnome-shell-list mailing list gnome-shell-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
