Boiko’s Blog

Introduction

The basic idea of Mandriva Mini is to provide a user interface that is suitable for small screen devices (such as the well known netbooks). The size of the screen is a very limiting factor that should be taken into account when planning a user interface for those devices. The screen space needs to be well used so that applications do not suffer much because of the space lost in taskbars, status bars and so on. The form factor of such devices is usually a wide screen which is not much large in height and it is more large in width. Taking this proportion, it would be a good idea to use more space vertically rather than horizontally for a taskbar, menu and status. This is the first point of this mockup:  

The default desktop proposed in this idea

All the screen space to be used is the left panel which contains the following:  

• The first item is the “My Documents” entry (which will be shown later in an screenshot)
• After the “My Documents” entry, you have all the menu categories for quickly accessing applications from each category.
• At the bottom there is the taskbar (which by default show only a single icon per application).

The Application Launcher  

Navigating through menu categories is a difficult task on a small screen because of the menu size (which will normally be small) and because of the screen space (which for bigger menus can be a problem as the size is normally small vertically). The idea proposed here is to provide quick and easy access to all menu categories in a straighforward way. To achieve this the menu categories were put in the main bar which will should be visible all the time (unless hidden by a fullscreen application - like a game or a presentation program). Clicking on a category shows its items as can be seen in the picture below:  

A menu category opened

The menu will normally be vertically centered trying to minimize the path the user needs to do using the mouse (or the touchpad). When the menu is at the top or near the bottom of the screen this centering can’t be done so, instead, the menu will make sure all items are visible. The number of rows and colums are dynamic, but the menu will keep a reasonable proportion between the number of rows and colums for a given menu.

My Documents

Some kind of documents (like pictures, movies, and music) are usually meant for entertaining, so a machine running Mandriva Mini should provide quick and easy access to those kind of documents, improving the user experience.  

My Documents

The picture above shows the menu entry for the user documents. For each of those categories (except the Documents itself) a simple interface should be provided. For pictures, as an example, the interface could be something like the photoviewer I created some time ago. This would provide two-clicks access to those documents.

The Taskbar

As can be seen in the screenshot, running tasks are shown as single icons in a limited space on the panel. The screen of netbooks (and possibly other small devices) does not have space for big entries for each running application or window (as the one provided by default in KDE4). So the idea is to keep them visible but restricting the size used by each entry.  This is the part of the idea that is not completelly clear. My first thought was to have that panel space to be a mix of taskbar and system tray. And for applications that have a system tray the taskbar and system tray icons would be merged into just one (this is the concept, I haven’t investigated how it could be done using X11). For the user to switch between applications, when the user moves the mouse over the taskbar, it is expanded as shown below:  

Running tasks

The active program/window is shown as selected. This window will stay opened while the user keeps the mouse focused on the taskbar space, so the user can click more than one entry while switching the active application.

Status Icons

The status icons would be part of the desktop (that meaning that they could be covered by other applications). 

Conclusion

The idea proposed here is not a finished project and there are many open points to be discussed. But it shows a way to overcome some of the limitations present on devices containing small screens. There are still a lot of room for improvements, so suggestions, critics and ideas are welcome.