Freaking awesome to see all the comments people have posted to my last entry, both positive and negative. The point after all is to solve these desktop-wide problems in the best way we can, in the open. That said, I can already see some recurring questions, so I’d like to respond to them as well as I can…
Why separate AbiWord-the-application from opened AbiWord documents?
I see some value in the split, and I think it’s worth exploring. For instance, if you have multiple Abi documents open, clicking on the Abi application icon cycles focus between them. If you’ve loaded an HTML file you are editing into Firefox, clicking the document’s icon could allow cycling focus between the editor and the Firefox tab.
Ideally, all documents will have a live thumbnail icon in the Gimmie Bar, and I think the perceived duplication between document and application goes away when the icons don’t look so much alike. They are distinct objects that deserve distinct representations.
Besides, there are many applications (and actions within applications) which are not document-oriented, and I’d like to keep them as first-class citizens too.
You seem to spend a lot of time closing Gimmie windows in that demo.
Stealing a feature from Tomboy, you can already press Escape to close Gimmie windows, but this is confusing in a screencast 
Other things I have in mind for speeding this up are making F1, F2, and F3 global shortcuts to toggle visibility of the Gimmie windows. Also, opening an item while holding down the Control key can dismiss the Gimmie window.
The colors are lame.
Luckily, these sorts of color choices are now themeable, so they can look however you want. In the future, the Gimmie Bar icon area could be transparent and the colors a gentle hue to aid visual grouping.
Why not just use Beagle for finding things?
I see Gimmie as a complement to the Beagle and Spotlight style of generic searching. I think it provides a “browse-mode” equivalent that can be easily learned and understood.
Interestingly, from my own experience, targetted or directed searching as seen in OSX Tiger’s Preferences, or the Gnome Panel’s Add Applet dialog, or Firefox’s Google bar are what I use most often. So Gimmie has this too.
This is great! But…
Gimmie is in it’s infancy, and now is the time to join in and steer the direction. It’s only 3,000 lines of Python code, spread over 11 files, so it shouldn’t take more than a couple days to learn as much as I know about the code.
Oh, and thanks!
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Shouldn’t F1 be for help? Gimmie looks awesome, by the way! It’s nice to see people thinking outside the box on desktop usability issues.
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Doh, nice catch Julian. I’ll have to come up with some other keys
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What about the Super_L (windows/mac/the third key) for gimmie.
I don’t think it has any default use in gnome. -
Looks nice, if combined with alt+tab (replace its original preview), and even more effects in Novell xgl shows.
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Did you really mean to spell it “Gimmie” and not Gimme?
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Ya, maybe. Gimmie, gimme. Seems like there is a lot less googlejuice for Gimmie, which is good, but people not being able to find the project due to a misspelling is bad.
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“I see some value in the split, and I think it’s worth exploring. For instance, if you have multiple Abi documents open, clicking on the Abi application icon cycles focus between them.”
You could even connect it to doing the “expose”-type thing that Mac users have become big fans of. Present thumbnails of all the documents/windows of that application.
“If you’ve loaded an HTML file you are editing into Firefox, clicking the document’s icon could allow cycling focus between the editor and the Firefox tab.”
That sounds potentially useful (still not certain of the idea of click-cycling, but as some menu or expose thing), as there are several document types out there where you want multiple views of the thing across several applications.
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“That sounds potentially useful (still not certain of the idea of click-cycling, but as some menu or expose thing), as there are several document types out there where you want multiple views of the thing across several applications.”
Making it possible to bind together apps in “tasks” would solve that issue.
Webedit:Shows only documents/tabs/windows from: Firefox, terminal and editor
Chat:Docs/tabs/windows from gaim, amsn and xchat. -
It shows all my aim buddies in “Everybody” but shows nothing in “Online Now” and “Recent People”. I have enabled remote control in gaim.
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