Consistent Desktop UI proposal

I’ve always been a bit particular with my desktop preferences. After using WindowMaker, Gnome+Sawfish, Ion2, WMII, Kde+Kwin, Gnome+Metacity, Compiz Fusion+AWN and testing out some more, I’ve yet to see one that fully addresses my needs.

One of my main complaints is the waste of screen real estate. Both window managers and applications themselves are at fault for this. The influence of Windows UI style in panels and windows has prevented most designers from getting the most out of the users’ screens. Ion2 is the window manager i’m currently most happy with, but it’s still not perfect if applications don’t properly cooperate, which is only possible if they follow some sort of guidelines (such as those discussed and published by the FreeDesktop project).

This blog post shows a suggestion that could, IMHO, improve the desktop experience, although maybe at the cost of reduced usability for computer illiterates.

As an introduction, here’s a quickly gimped draft of the idea I had some months ago:

The increase in usable space is obvious (well, at least to power users). The famous and ancient “title bar” is gone. We already have the window title in the so-called task bar, so why repeat it again using a whole horizontal bar for it? And what’s with the habit of dedicating another whole bar for 5 tiny application menues? Furthermore, the old status bar can be set to automatically hide for additional real estate (with a behaviour similar to that of Google browser Chrome).

Most interactive widgets have been moved to the top of screen (but they might as well have been placed on the bottom or aside). Personally, I see no reason for spreading buttons all over the screen, other than following the current desktop environment trends. Having them all close together greatly reduces the need to move the mouse.

Keep in mind that the tabs depicted in that draft are not supposed to be fullscreen-only, but have a mixed TDI & MDI behaviour (similar to Opera but, instead, leaving the management of those document windows to… well, the window manager 🙄 ).

But it doesn’t stop there. While we’re at it, why not merge the ideas behind desktops and apps? Here’s the natural evolution of the original idea:

There, the concept of virtual desktops is applied as a way to organize tabs (instead of using yet more windows for the same application instance).

The key is what I’ve just decided to name generic-bar. This bar contains an “app” icon (gnome icon, firefox icon, favicon…), abstracted pager, “tabs” and applets (menues, buttons, traditional applets…) in any desired number and order. For example, in the last draft there are two generic bars: the first one contains “applications”, while the second one contains what we currently know as “tabs”. In essence, both applications and tabs would be handled the same way by the proposed desktop environment. Furthermore, this hypothetical desktop environment could handle generic-bar nesting of any depth.

The good thing is that this desktop proposal does not remove any functionality currently found on most desktop environment UIs, but actually adds more while freeing up even more space for your valuable applications to use.