Gnome-shell

I was very intrigued when I saw the first bits of mutter and gnome-shell leaking out and pooling all over the web around talk of GNOME 3.0. Never one to wait for new technology I immediately went to http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell and got things building. Then all it took was one ./gnome-shell --replace for me to have a new desktop project to work on.


Well it wasn't so simple. I was a bit behind on my gtk/gnome technologies and much to learn before I could get started. Technologies like clutter, gobject-introspection , and gjs had to be absorbed. 2 days later I was ready to get moving and I haven't looked back since.

Since I was a seasoned metacity, xcompmgr hacker I figured the first thing I could do was help to get metacity-mutter cleaned up and renamed to mutter for gnome inclusion.


Okay took there of that. Now what? It was time to start working on some new usability ideas. I am still sold on the idea of organizing workspaces as activities, however the shell needed some more small things changed for it to be usable to me. I will get to the activities idea in another post.

One of the more intriguing design ideas that had been discussed was Sander's breadcrumbs. After it was first brought up, maybe 3 days later a working demo was published for consumption. Definitely what I was looking for, but other life was keeping me away from too much work on gnome-shell.

posted on Thursday, July 23, 2009

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