A simple and productivity-oriented GNOME Shell UI replacement that provides an innovative and automated mouse/keyboard workflow aiming to be easier and faster to use by providing a great user experience.
Made by following the Material Design guidelines - a solid baseline that allows us to provide an aesthetically pleasing and accessible interface.
The workflow is the heart of the shell and what everything is built around. It's designed to simplify navigation and reduce the need to manipulate windows in order to improve productivity.
The concept of application categories is an important part of our workflow - they allow us to regroup apps by use-case and group apps which are meant to be used together.
To prevent manual reorganizization of windows every time we start a new app or change activities, Material Shell automates this process by automatically resizing and positioning windows in a predictable way.
This can be visualized as a grid:
Each colored row represents a category, every cell represents an application window, and the white area in the center represents the visible area of the screen.
Every new application is automatically positioned inside this grid at the end of its category's row.
This allow us to provide intuitive navigation by moving the screen around a larger context. Navigating up and down will change the current category and navigating left and right change the current window(s) on screen.
The interface is designed to represent the state of the workflow and provide navigation capabilities for both mouse and touchscreens.
The interface is divided in two parts.
On the left side everything pertains to the system: current status, notifications, etc.
On the right everything is related to the active category: the windows on the category's grid, the layout switcher, and the windows themselves.
The two most important components are the system panel (on the left) and the category panel (on the top).
The system panel is the main component of the left side of the interface. It consists of:
- Category switcher: This component lists all the categories available and the currently selected category. It allows us to navigate to a specific category by clicking on its icon.
- System tray: This component lists all the information about the system, e.g. network status, bluetooth connectivity, volume, battery, and notification icons.
The category panel is the main component of the right side of the interface. It consists of:
- App switcher: This component lists all the application windows opened in the current category's grid and the currently focused one. It allows us to navigate to a specific window within the grid by selecting its item.
- Layout switcher: This component displays the current layout of the category and can be clicked to switch to the next available layout.