While at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, an impromptu graphic and UI design session erupted in the hotel hackfest room. We worked on GNOME artwork and design related subject matter. A few of us discussed and sketched wireframe mockups of gnome-shell and Nautilus.

This hackweek, I decided to start fleshing out the mockups. I tried getting gnome-shell properly working on my machine (running openSUSE 11.1), and was mostly unsuccessful there. I have a lot of ideas based on the BetterDesktop usability studies we did at Novell (years ago) and would be interested in helping out the gnome-shell crew. (:

I saw David’s recent blog post on a simplified Nautilus and decided to skip past gnome-shell (for now) and produce something that should hopefully benefit all users of GNOME (regardless of using gnome-shell or not): Streamlining Nautilus.

These somewhat-polished mockups are based on the wireframes and discussions (that we unfortunately did not write down) from GCDS. They are not pixel perfect (but should be somewhat close). A menu bar is not included in the mockups (similar to David’s screenshot) — but the menus do need to be retooled as well.

Icons not in the toolbar would be configurable somehow. Keyboard shortcuts would all work the same.

…There are many more notes in the actual mockup, so click the thumbnail teaser graphic and view the full thing at 1:1 size already! (:

As stated in the mockup, you can contact me via @garrett on Twitter, over email, or in IRC. (I prefer Twitter and IRC over email, by-the-way)… or you could post a comment on this blog post too.