Thursday, March 18, 2010

All-Super Bar

After reading this Windows 8 Concept I was inspired to come up with my own concept All-Super Bar.

The idea is really simple: The Super Bar in Windows 7 merged the Quick Launch bar and the task bar into one bar, the All-Super Bar merges the system tray with them too.

How will that work? Here's how:

You can still pin applications to the Super-All Bar, when you click on them they will run. However, instead of having a context menu pop up, it shows whatever commands and buttons the application needs, not necessarily in a menu; it could be a mini dialog box (kinda like what WMP's play, previous, and next buttons in windows 7).

The applications that reside in the system tray will appear in the same bar which increases their efficiency and usability.

The All-Super Bar will also replace the panel applets in GNOME.

The idea is still vague but it seems very interesting, instead of having 3 separate bars for not running, running, and hidden applications you just have one bar from which you can manage all your applications.

In my GNOME desktop I have DockBarX, the system tray, the notifications applet, the time applet, the logout applet, the show desktop applet, the Main Menu applet, and the Workspace Switcher applet.

I imagine a bar in which all of these are items on the bar.

The menu is an item that has the applications the custom menu I referred to earlier, the system tray items are added to the bar as individual items, the clock is an item by itself, so is the Logout and the show desktop. the Workspace Switcher can be different shortcuts for the different Workspaces, changing icons periodically to reflect the changes in that workspace.

Notifications will pop from whatever application in the bar.