perspectives

Source

It's always interesting to get a look at how other people see things. GNOME Shell, by default, shows only the time in the center of the top panel, showing the date (and calendar) when you click on it. I change this to show the day and date as well, as I'm forever forgetting it, and there's lots of dead space up there in the panel anyway, so it may as well be put to some kind of practical use. This is an option in gnome-tweak-tool, and I've seen quite a few screenshots configured the same way, so I know I'm not alone in this. So, I filed a bug proposing this be made the default. It's lots of fun reading the replies. There are objections I simply would never have thought of, in a million years. Allan Day worries that "Day, date, time" is not symmetrical, where "time" alone is. Andreas Nilsson considers what smartphone interfaces do with the same information. Both of these are considerations I'd just never have even thought of. I'm not sure I agree with either, but it's neat to see what comes to other people's minds that doesn't come to yours.

Comments

coling wrote on 2011-07-04 09:22:
hehe, yeah I've also changed the default here on my Desktop. It think the two points your mentioned above are valid enough (tho' I will not attach any personalised value of "importance" to them. The aesthetics of symmetry one is interesting as a general case, but the "how things are done on smartphones is particularly bogus IMO. Desktops/latptops, netbooks, tablets and smartphones are four very different interfaces and we should not always cater to the lowest common denominator. If there is insufficient space on the top bar on a smart phone vs. a desktop then we should simply have a different set of default settings. In the same way that CSS Styling has an @screen and @print type qualifiers for different end targets, so should settings. That said, I thought the longer term goal with Gnome 3 was to get the application menu up in the top bar anyway? In that case it'll take up too much room and certainly wont work on smartphones etc.
nathaniel wrote on 2011-07-04 19:41:
That's priceless. I am going to file a bug proposing that Gnome Shell report the time rounded to the nearest palindrome. This will greatly enhance symmetry, albeit at the expense of some slight temporal precision. But we're not building a desktop for people without wristwatches. If you're the kind of person who cares about time, you're the kind of person who can use the command line to type "date." Speaking of, how is the unity packaging effort for fedora coming? I actually rather love gnome 3 despite myself, but I cant quite decide if I like unity better.
adamw wrote on 2011-07-04 19:52:
unity: stuck waiting for hicham to reply to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=693233 .