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Please note that before reading this, this is for altering the default Plasma Netbook interface to free up a bit of space by moving the menu bar to the top panel with some other minor widget placement adjustments, not a proposal to make any new widgets (with the exception of a possible new menu).

This is a bit of a different direction than the current netbook interface goes, but I think it may be a bit more useful. As you can see, it would be necessary to have a global menu bar made before it can work, but the reasoning behind the global menu bar is so that you get an entire extra line of space freed up. Always nice on a small screen.

[img]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4062/4476734241_1b23682d40_o.jpg[/img]

I'm not aware of how this works on a Mac, but I figured applications could be in a dropdown to the left of File. You could also set up an expose for the top right corner if you prefer that effect. This running applications menu could possibly be consolidated into the one below, I'll call it the K Menu for now.

[img]http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4068/4476734263_935583cbaf_o.jpg[/img]

The K Menu would include the awesome Search and Launch page, the Newspaper (not shown, I forgot about it), and shutdown/logout options. Basically just combines activities with shutdown commands. Like I said before, because this menu and the running applications menu are both rather small, it may make sense to combine them to save some horizontal space as well. Or, maybe it makes more sense for the K Menu to become just a button that puts you to a "main screen," sort of like a gnome-based netbook interface might, and combine the newspaper and Search and Launch into one page similar to Moblin.

Any thoughts/criticisms on this?

The main issue I have is it is basically requesting that several existing or proposed widgets be combined in an otherwise ordinary panel. The list of windows can already be achieved with the window list plasmoid, and the global menu bar plasmoid has been requested too many times to count and has a proposed GSOC project for it anyway. So this idea is really just a combination of existing ideas and features, any the whole point of plasma is that you can combine these sorts of things however you want. So rather than have an entire idea for this, most of which is redundant, it would probably be better to just isolate the one new thing, which is the new application menu you have on the far left.

I would absolutely agree with everything you just said, and I am aware that the global menu bar is proposed for GSOC. But on the side that it's "just requesting that several existing or proposed widgets be combined in an otherwise ordinary panel" would suggest that there is no need to have a netbook interface at all; rather, if you want one, then just move the panel to the top and remove the window borders. The current netbook interface, after all, is quite simply just a different combination of widgets on the same panel. My main goal here is to show that while the current default netbook interface is very good, I think there are some things that could be switched around to make it (the default layout) even more usable and screen-efficient, not necessarily propose new widgets altogether.

So to sum up that paragraph, this is only a request to change the default layout of the Plasma Netbook Interface to be a bit more usable, not necessarily proposing new widgets altogether, but a new combination of them. Hope that clears it up a bit.

It does here, but not in the idea - please edit your idea and add a line emphasising how the idea is about a default combination involving this setup.

Added that as the first line. Hope that helps.