GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 81843
panels autohiding to the corner of the screen
Last modified: 2015-03-24 13:00:38 UTC
I hate to quote tog but his comment on the autohide in windows apply to gnome as well: 1. The auto-hidden Taskbar in window is entirely too easy to display by accident. Users are constantly triggering it when trying to access something that is close to, but not at, the edge. 2. The Taskbar would not have any of these problems, yet be even quicker to get to if it were located at any one of four corners of the display. Throw the mouse up and to the left, for example, and you'll have a taskbar displayed. Fast access without the false triggering. I think for at least edge panel autohide should launche from the bottom left hand corner just like the arrow hide buttons do.
usability-maint: thoughts? Dave makes sense here, AFAICT, though I admit it would take a bit of getting used to for me...
I actually like this better too. However it is a bit too late for 2.0.0, perhaps we can experiment with this for some point release. Either we could add a preference or just change to the side hiding by default. That is, if we decide it's worth it.
George i agree this is a post 2.0 idea, and will be a major usability upgrade.
*** Bug 1702 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Mark: This is another of my pet peave bugs :) Really keeps me from using autohide, since the current autohide behavior is fairly annoying.
Okay, I've tried this out in the new widget and its not too bad - I dunno whether or not it'll get annoying after the novelty factor goes, though - but I'm certainly willing to give it a go in 2.4. Here's the behaviour I have: * Expanded panel's (i.e. old edge panels) + panel on top or right edge -> hide into top right corner + panel on bottom or left edge -> hide into bottom left corner * Non-expanded panel in a screen corner + panel hides into that corner * Non-expanded panel on the screen edge but not in a corner + panel just hides off the edge of the screen (the old behaviour) * Free floating panel + panel doesn't auto hide The default amount of panel visible when it auto hides is a 6x6 pixel square. Let me know if you thing it should do anything different from that
Unfortunately I'm on dialup right now, so i have no way to test this :( Is the 6x6 area actually viewable by the user (it doesn't have to be since we are providing a very fast activation method). As far as the novelty factor getting annoying, I think some users may complain about this at first since it is different from what they are used to, but this really makes better use of the screen edges, while lowering the annoyance of accidentally unhiding the panel whenever the mouse slips to the bottom of the screen (well for a hidden bottom edge panel in this example but you get the point). Maybe i'll finally get a cable modem and try this out :)
Dave, its not in CVS yet ... I'm just asking you to comment on whether you think the behaviour sounds okay.
:) yeah it sounds good.
Okay, this is now in CVS, but I'm hearing various grumblings about it. Dave: now that you can see this in action, do you still think its a good idea ?
*** Bug 115700 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
From #81843: Auto-hidden panels now hide themselves to only a corner, as opposed to the length/width the panel had parallel to the screen edge. This makes it awkward to see that there's an auto-hidden panel, let alone re-activate it. While the effect is visually very nice, it does not contribute to the usability of the panel's auto-hide behavior in my opinion, and should be made an option at least, or removed if such configuration is too complex.
(Hmm, that previous quote was from bug #115700) This comment from bug #115725: I have an autohiding panel on the right of my screen, and a normal panel at the bottom. I shove my mouse into the top-right corner of the screen to get a panel of launchers (you do this sort of thing when you use an 800x600 screen :-) ). I thought that sometimes the autohiding panel was totally disappearing; on reading the ChangeLog, it appears that when my mouse was below center when it exited the panel, it hides underneath my bottom panel with no way of getting it back. As a sidenote: From a usability pov, I would expect to always be able to get an autohiding panel to display by moving my mouse to the same part of the screen, instead of having to vary where it goes each time. Cc-ing usability-maint. This is CVS from June 11.
I think my main gripe with it right now is that the showing/hiding is too slow. From a purely technical standpoint, slamming the mouse into the corner should be as fast (if not faster) an access point as hitting the bottom screen edge and less annnoying. One thing i noticed is that right handed users will probably prefer that auto hidden bottom panels hide into the right corner as oppose to the left as it easier to hit that corner with the mouse. Does calum have an opinion? Oh and in reference to the second comment, I think it shows that we're on the right track an might just need to tune the behavior.
Hmm, just tried this out for the first time today. It does look cool, but I have to say that, on my (and probably any) laptop with a touchpad, "slamming the mouse into the corner" definitely isn't as easy as slamming it to some random point on the edge of the screen. I guess I also find it a little weird that an expanded panel (i.e. what used to be called an edge panel) minimizes into some arbitrary corner... seeing it for the first time, I'd kind of expect it only to happen if the panel was unexpanded and already docked in a corner. I know that wouldn't solve the original problem of accidentally displaying the taskbar, though. There's also the problem that if I have two autohiding panels, one on the left of the screen and one along the bottom, they both collapse into the same corner and I have no way of controlling which one is shown when I move my mouse there. So I guess my opinion FWIW is that it would be good to experiment with further, but I don't think it's quite ready for prime time as it is...
This sounds like an interesting idea 'on paper', but in practice it's excruciating. I've had a number of comments from users (who are a bit embarrassed to comment on a bug, I'll see if I can inspire them) that the new panel rocks very hard, but the hiding into the corner thing is "just bizarre". Consider this scenario: I want to see the date thingy that appears when I click on the clock applet, and my clock is at the conventional top right position. A hidden top panel disappears into the left hand corner, so to see the date drop down, I have to throw my mouse into the corner, then move it all the way across the screen to the clock applet and then click. This is altogether too much work. If the panel hid in a 'conventional' manner, I would just throw the mouse cursor towards the thing I want to click on. Far better for the muscle memory, and amount of work required. Yes, this is pretty, yes this is theoretically an interesting idea to experiment, but no, this does not work well in practice. I would very strongly recommend that we "spend our different points wisely" elsewhere. Thanks Mark, the new panel is a thing of beauty and elegance.
The new behaviour of hiding in a corner where there is no control on in which corner the panel hides is very contra productive. If my mouse happens to be on the left side of the screen, the hidden panel is on the right hand corner and the option in the panel that I need is in the left hand side of it, I have to move my mouse twice over the complete screen to get to where I want to. When you disable the expand, the old behaviour is back BUT there is no way to get the panel back to being accross the complete border of the screen. I would suggest: 1 an option that controls which corner it hides in 2 AND an option that switches between the old behaviour (hiding at the complete length of the border) and yes the way the panel comes and goes is cool:) but contra productive
I don't think this needs to be unbroken by adding options. It just needs to be unbroken. :-)
I disagree Jeff, I would say that the developer had a specific goal in mind. Plus it is not broken. It is changed. Broken, for me, means that it does not work anymore. But it does still work without core dumps or loss of control.
well for expanded panels, why not just allow showing from either corner of the screen?
Okay, I've removed this again. It just seems to make autohide more difficult for people to use ... also, I suspect that people who are used to using autohide don't have the problem with accidently triggering the un-hiding. 2003-07-22 Mark McLoughlin <mark@skynet.ie> Remove auto-hiding into the corner again. It seems the only people who like it are people who don't use autohide panels :-) The main fault with it seems to be that you have to do a lot of tricky manoevouring to put you mouse into the corner and then bring it back to whatever you wanted on the panel. See #81843. * panel-toplevel.c: (panel_toplevel_update_struts): fix struts weirdness with autohide panels. (panel_toplevel_update_auto_hide_position): don't hide into corners any more. (panel_toplevel_start_animation): hmm, MAX (func (x), func (y)) isn't very efficient is it now ? Also, don't take into account the end width and height when they are -1 - fixes slowness in hiding. (panel_toplevel_enter_notify_event), (panel_toplevel_leave_notify_event), (panel_toplevel_instance_init): kill code to figure out which corner to hide to based on the last leave notify.