GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 589510
Most-used applications in favorites well?
Last modified: 2011-02-10 00:31:22 UTC
We earlier had planned filling up the favorites well with most-used applications.; that does not happen now. Most-used applications only show up in More applications/frequent. It's not 100% clear that including them in the favorites area is a good idea: Pro: - Allows non-customizers to have a userful set of apps in their favorites area Con: - Might make it harder to understand what the area is about, and make it less predictable about what is in there But I wanted to check that the idea had been explicitly decided against, rather than just lost in code churn.
The user's most used? I thought we just decided to go with the static list of globally popular in GConf. Maybe we could put the user's most used but not favorite in the bottom area, even if they're not running?
After working on that feature for some time, I've eventually convinced myself that pre-filling the favorites would be a really nice feature. Many people won't fill their favorites list manually, and even advanced users could benefit from the fact that their most-used apps appear there automatically. The problem is, we can't detect on first run what are the favorite apps to initially add, say, 5 launchers: we need to fill the favorites as the stats evolve. A proposal I can make is that we ensure the favorites list is always filled with at least 5 apps; if the user as manually set less launchers than that, we make up for the difference taking the most-used apps. A fading button/context menu should allow them to be removed if wanted. Does that sound reasonable to you?
I think the data could be useful too; the design of the favorites/running is still evolving, let's run the idea past the designers.
From discussion, we've decided we want to try this. Our current applications browse is not good for navigating to apps that you know are there, and current ideas for replacements (use a scrolling alphabetical or category-sorted list of all your apps) aren't better, so we're really depending on favoriting. But as Milan says, many people won't do this. * Start off with one row (probably 4 apps) of apps favorited as the GConf schea defaulted; user can add/remove. * After showing favorite apps, we fill up to the end of the second row with top frequent apps. (I think this means that if you've favorited at least 8 apps, we show no more frequent apps. Not completely sure.) * Non-favorite-frequent running apps are shown after that
Favorites well sounds like my suggestion in bug 595320. "[Give] immediate access to Activities>Frequent list. Say, clicking anywhere on desktop with middle/wheel botton gives access to Frequent." In addition you want to populate it at the very beginning. Adding to subject. Let's do 3D cube where sides are rotating cylinders containing all software in section (say Frequent, Internet, Graphic, Office, Sound, Video).
Now I'm using Docky (gnome do) covered by Top Menubar. I'm having about 1/8" of Docky sticking out of Top Menubar. Howering the mouse over it gives a clear Application visibility.
I believe this is now NOTABUG according to the design?