Playing with Big Board

[Colin Walters]

On Tue, 2007-05-08 at 01:33 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:

> So what happens when I don't have a net connection or just don't want to 
> have a mugshot account? Can big board cope up with that and produce a 
> reasonably good user experience similar with what we have with our 
> current "offline desktop" if you will.

It wants you to sign in, but you can use the app browser in an offline
mode right now, though admittedly it isn't as good.

Keep in mind that the big board is intended to be part of the larger
online desktop mode, and I think Mugshot fits pretty well for someone
who mostly uses online apps.  

> It looks like a text box though the icon tool tip says "Show previously 
> used actions" and I tried typing in browser (some grayed text that says 
> search here or a title "Search" might make it more obvious) 

That's in the mockups actually, but it's difficult to implement right
now due to the way we reuse deskbar (a fix for this would really be a
fix for deskbar).

> which showed 
> up a list of applications with the word browser on them which was 
> expected but there was some entries like login photo which was 
> unexpected. 

It searches full description, I assume the login photo chooser had some
random bit of text in there.  We might refine the search to have some
concept of relevance, but I think it's pretty decent for now.

> It produces a search list from yahoo which was unexpected 
> since I don't yahoo for searches. I couldn't figure out why or how I 
> could change it to use a different search engine or just turn off web 
> searches.  I was expecting it to pick up the search engine settings from 
> Firefox.

A lot of people (including me) will likely be using Google for searches,
but - there is no Google search API for programs any more.  Trust me if
we could we would! 

I'm sure the deskbar developers would love if this was fixed somehow
too, but the only Google API available now basically requires a web
browser, and I'm not sure how that could be fit into the search results
cleanly.

> In general I find applications unexpecting launching web pages and 
> grabbing focus annoying. Reminds me of advertising popups that distract 
> me from whatever task I was set to do.  Big board does that and does 
> that unexpectedly. For example, more in the applications stock launches 
> a hybrid between a menu and a panel while other similar sections 
> launches mugshot pages.

Right now I think it is annoying that firefox doesn't come to the top; I
think we may have to pass a timestamp or something to gnome-open. But a
big part of the online desktop is integrating with web pages, so we will
need to make sure it works well.

> I think having more settings within the application itself while picking 
> up whatever settings it needs from mugshot, flickr or whatever service 
> on the background would be better. Changing my photo id, adding some 
> applications stock, installing ,uninstalling one from the system via the 
> menu etc.
> 

We're trying to avoid duplicating existing stuff such as the list-infos
portion of Mugshot.

> I want my local desktop experience to be coherent connected applications 
> rather than a loose collection of web pages linked from a application 
> which is what big board feels like.

A big goal of the online desktop is to make the experience better for
people who already mostly use web applications like GMail/Flickr etc.
In isolation the big board using the browser may seem different, but I
think the picture will make more sense when we have things like e.g.
GMail under the Applications menu.

> Yes. A normal menu would close when I click elsewhere. I think the GNOME 
> slab menu which looks very similar in structure does the same. I was 
> trying to access another application via a icon on the desktop or just 
> read my mail instead of big board menu staying on top. It would have 
> been ok if it didn't close as long as it would just moved out of my way 
> and stay on the background when I click something.

I've removed the keep_on_top flag in Subversion which should help.