GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 691534
Hard to get to the message tray / notification area on touchscreens
Last modified: 2014-08-29 17:26:04 UTC
Bouncing the cursor at the bottom of the screen doesn't work at all on touchscreens, and getting to the message tray is very difficult. Even if it doesn't solve the problem for every touchscreen device[1], using a slide upwards from the edge of the screen should pull the message tray up. [1]: works great on tablets where the screen flushes with the surrounding border, doesn't work one bit with my desktop machine[2] which has a half-an-inch border around the screen. Windows 8 is nearly unusable on that machine as well as it uses the mechanism mentioned above to trigger the "charms" toolbar. [2]: http://www.blugga.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Lenovo-IdeaCentre-A700-1.jpg
(In reply to comment #0) ... > Even if it doesn't solve the problem for every touchscreen device[1], using a > slide upwards from the edge of the screen should pull the message tray up. Sounds good. > [1]: works great on tablets where the screen flushes with the surrounding > border, doesn't work one bit with my desktop machine[2] which has a > half-an-inch border around the screen. Windows 8 is nearly unusable on that > machine as well as it uses the mechanism mentioned above to trigger the > "charms" toolbar. Perhaps we could have a gesture for such cases, like 3/4 finger upwards swipe?
note 3 finger upward swipe is "summon overview" with logitech touchpads
*** Bug 686618 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 657273 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is a significant issue for me. I have a Dell XPS-12 convertible notebook and Gnome Shell can't really be used when in tablet mode because of a combination of factors that would be addressed by fixing this issue. Summary of why this is important to me: 1) The on-screen keyboard does not appear automatically for many applications when entering a text input-field; therefore 2) to force the on-screen keyboard to appear I have to access the message tray which has the button that will force display of on-screen keyboard; therefore 3) I need to make the message tray appear from tablet mode, which appears to be impossible (needs the physical keyboard to be used). I might be missing a trick here, but this issue seems to preclude Gnome Shell getting any meaningful use with tablets by making text entry impossible. I'm really impressed overall with Gnome Shell operating on a touch screen (other than this issue). I think Gnome Shell design/usability is far superior to Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu/Unity on touchscreen.
bug 735625 has a patch to get the message tray to appear. Simon, you might want to test again with GNOME 3.14, and file bugs for your problems if they don't already exist. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 735625 ***