GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 689876
Overview padding make dash and windows picker difficult to use on little screens
Last modified: 2012-12-15 17:22:42 UTC
With the last design of the overview, the padding has augmented to 40px (I didn't find the bug report of this change) This change makes difficult to use dash and windows picker. Also the visual is a little ugly in general on little screens (pictures from 1366x768, 13'3" laptop). See attached picture.
The current behavior: http://postimage.org/image/gh9y8li2v/ As you see the dash and windows thumbnails are too little to be usable and to be pretty. I propose 15 px of padding: http://postimage.org/image/mbvllr5l7/ That makes dash and windows picker more usable and pretty. If it is not pretty for largest screens, we can make a dynamic padding, depending of the resolution of the screen. But IMHO usability is more important than beauty in this kind of things. What do you think?
Created attachment 231016 [details] [review] Overview: Reduce spacing from 40px to 15px With 40 px of spacing the dash and the windows picker are difficult to use on little screens. With reducing spacing to 15px makes overview more usable.
I just saw that the previous spacing(in 3.6.x) was 12px, so I request you please reconsider to revert the change to again 12px or something close to that.
Created attachment 231527 [details] [review] tweaked patch Good catch, Carlos. I'm pretty sure that this was an accident. I've had a play around with this to see if I can make the thumbnails a bit bigger. I've also made the background shade darker to compensate for the increased density.
Before and after screenshots: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5031519/gnome-shell/screenshots/make-window-thumbnails-bigger.png Jon and Jakub: what do you think? Too dense?
Thanks Aday, I feel dificult to work with the current behaviour. Happy to know that this will change. I will test your patch and attach a picture with your patch working in mi little screen.
Created attachment 231561 [details] [review] updated patch Here's an updated version of the patch. It gives a little bit more breathing room to the search bar. It also makes the overview background shade much darker. (In my tests, I found that it was very hard to use the window thumbnails in conjunction with a noisy wallpaper. Increasing the opacity of the background shade helps with this.)
Screenshot of the latest patch in action: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5031519/gnome-shell/screenshots/Screenshot%20from%202012-12-14%2010%3A43%3A29.png
Looking great, one minor nitpick — the label seems to be restricted by the width of the associated thumbnail, not the space in the grid. It makes it less useful for narrow windows.
(In reply to comment #9) > Looking great, one minor nitpick — the label seems to be restricted by the > width of the associated thumbnail, not the space in the grid. It makes it less > useful for narrow windows. Cool, I'll push this then. There's a few issues with the window captions: see bug 688234.
Pushed a slightly amended version of the patch: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/commit/?id=468a855f04be04b2bb3f963660a1450303cf4791 Thanks for picking up on this, Carlos (and let us know what you think of the update).
(In reply to comment #8) > Screenshot of the latest patch in action: > > https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5031519/gnome-shell/screenshots/Screenshot%20from%202012-12-14%2010%3A43%3A29.png Is it intended that the rightmost column of thumbnails touches the workspace switcher? See the "Pictures" thumbnail.
(In reply to comment #12) ... > Is it intended that the rightmost column of thumbnails touches the workspace > switcher? See the "Pictures" thumbnail. That's a different bug (the layout of the overview has been re-enigneered recently; there's a bit of fallout to deal with).
Allan, I think you found a good balance between little and large screens. Since your change from my proposal is not affecting too much on little screens and give more breathing to large screens. There's all compared: http://postimage.org/image/mq9vysq2n/full/
(In reply to comment #14) ... Good to hear. :) Bug 687787 is also intended to give a bit more space to the window thumbnails - we can hopefully make things even better for the small screen case.