I used to use dillo as my browser of choice. It truncated tabs by dropping vowels, which I thought was really clever. I have no idea how well that would work in other languages, though.
For those complaining about the details: I think this represents the code and general work on a new interface that is coming out. The applications that it is working with are the utilities that have been included in Gnome for quite a while and the names worked fine with the old menu system; clearly the work being demonstrated is on the interface level. The current interface only takes the default application names it is being fed. I´m sure a finished ¨product¨ will take into account these details, but I don´t find it unreasonable that it looks how it does in an Alpha product. Simply changing what the name appears as in the shell isn´t going to be the long term solution.
I'm not criticizing truncation. You need to do it on long names. I'm saying it looks like the designers of the GNOME UI are using truncation as a quick fix for a flawed design.
Notice how the tracking (spacing between letters) in the first item gets tightened to make it fit? It looks a little squished, but it's much preferable to reading dots.
The last item had to be truncated, but it happens in the middle and keeps the useful end information visible.
I was being honest when I said I was amazed at the GNOME truncation. I think an operating system UI that can't handle the names of its killer apps (e.g., OpenOffic…) lost its way somewhere.
Also, if you do this on the desktop or in the finder with grid/icon view, OSX will word-wrap for a couple notches before trying to "middle-truncate". Loss of information is their last resort.
> I'm not criticizing truncation. You need to do it on long names. I'm saying it looks like the designers of the GNOME UI are using truncation as a quick fix for a flawed design.
Yeah, I thought it looked pretty obvious because it was so bad it just hadn't been gotten to.
While I can't articulate on whether pango's ellipsizing is as smart as Apple's, it should be as simple as changing a single property from PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_END to PANGO_ELLIPSIZE_MIDDLE.
> Besides, truncation in OS X is much much smarter:
Don't forget Apple (among others) has tons of silly patents regarding text rendering that Gnome developers have to program around while everybody else can just cross-license with their own silly little patents. It may be possible they simply cannot afford the risk of doing the obvious thing.
Do you actually know that Gnome is actively "code around" some alleged patent violation?
Programming around any imaginable patent violation actually seems really bad, especially given that software patents aren't looking as strong as they once were. I vaguely Linus or someone saying it's better not to research existing patents, it limits your liability. But just on the principle of letting corporations covertly bully you, it seems bad. It seems much better to force the companies sue you and see what happens.
My googling shows Apple has a patent on the App-bar but there are plenty of App-bars out-there. Red-hat apparently was worried to remove a dock but the screen shots we see here clearly show something like a dock. But even thread discussing that situation sounded murky. Docky still seems to be distributed for example.
Apple has patent on "Open Type" but that also is used heavily in Linux.
Well, if this is wide-spread, I find frustrating, even infuriating that it only appears in bits and pieces rather than there being a large "this is what software patents are imposing on us". The worst possible thing is to let this happen silently.
I've heard of the free-type patents and I found references to the patenting of OS dock (hasn't end free docks in Linux as far as I can see - especially, the Gnome Shell look a lot like a dock).
I oppose that Free-type patents like all software patents but they don't scare me too much because sub-pixel rendering's value is debatable and it's not something that should affect programming at a higher level.
On the other hand, in the context of the thread, when rbanffy said "Don't forget Apple (among others) has tons of silly patents regarding text rendering that Gnome developers have to program around", in response to "truncation in OS X is much much smarter", he seemed to imply there were patents on the level of simply truncating text.
How can anyone see Network C…, Network P…, Network P… in the preference panel and not wonder if the truncation is too agressive?