Contents
GNOME Shell Features Page
The purpose of this page is to describe the user benefits of the new GNOME Shell and how it will enable people's interactions with computers to be:
- More productive or efficient
- More enjoyable
Overview
The GNOME Shell has rich visual effects enabled by new graphical technologies and redefines the following user interactions:
- Launching applications
- Opening files
- Switching between open windows
- Adding and deleting workspaces
- Moving windows between workspaces
- Dynamic system-related information display (including transient notifications)
- Providing a flat list of user-account related actions
- Logging out or switching the session, and stopping or restarting the machine
Design Principles
The guiding principles behind GNOME Shell are based on making the desktop an intuitive and convenient tool for accessing applications, documents, contacts, notifications and system preferences. GNOME Shell design goals are:
- To provide few clear starting targets and expose convenient features in order to create a good experience for novice, as well as experienced, users
- "Activities" and user-actions buttons, built-in search, exposing workspaces
- To define particular ways in which desktop components should work instead of making them infinitely configurable, thereby making a default desktop behaviour and its integration with the rest of the system create a consistent and well-organized user experience
- To reduce the time taken to find pertinent information
- Consistent and familiar placing of information-display widgets
- To reduce the time taken to execute frequent operations
- Flat lists of applications and files, mouse or keyboard-mediated activation
- To reduce in time taken to find less frequently used items
- Keyboard-mediated search
- To reduce in time taken to execute less frequently performed operations
- Keyboard-mediated search
Current Features
Top Menubar
The top menubar has two clear targets for the user:
- Activities item in the left corner that brings up the Activities Overview
- User name and icon in the right corner that bring up the user menu with system-related actions
Activities Overview
The overview is a full-screen mode that allows one to quickly start or resume an activity. It clearly presents workspaces and open windows. The current screenshot of the Activities Overview can be seen here.
The overview has the following attributes:
- It clearly displays favorite and currently running applications
- It includes a search capability
- It provides a clear and direct display of all open windows and workspaces
- It provides access to a full listing of applications on the system
Sidebar
The shell now has a sidebar providing additional "widgets" outside of overlay mode. The sidebar is even more a work-in-progress than the rest of the shell. More notes are available here.
Screencast Recording
GNOME Shell has a built-in feature that allows video recording of the desktop activity. This makes it easy to create high quality screencasts describing the current state of GNOME Shell, but also enables users to make screencasts of their desktop or any particular program. In the future, this feature can be used by some programs for performing usability studies.
Control+Shift+Alt+R keybinding starts and stops the recording. A red circle is displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen when the recording is in progress. After the recording is finished, a file named 'shell-%d%u-%c.webm' is saved in the home directory. In the filename, %d is the date, %u is a string that makes the filename unique, and %c is a counter that is incremented each time a recording is made within a single gnome-shell session.
Status
The new GNOME Shell is not a finished product: it is a work-in-progress. See GnomeShell for more details on how to build and try out the latest GNOME Shell.