Alan Day Allan Day , member of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, spoke about the upcoming interface design changes in the GNOME 40 release scheduled for March 24, 2021 … The most notable redesign will be in the Activities Overview, which will offer a new spatial layout.
In the new overview mode, virtual desktops are arranged horizontally, close to their actual appearance, and displayed as a continuous loop from left to right. Each desktop displayed in overview mode clearly shows the available windows, which are additionally provided with an application icon and a title that appears on hover.
The interface for navigating the available applications (App grid) has been improved. Conceptual changes are already included in GNOME 3.38, for example, application icons are divided into several screens, support for arbitrary regrouping and distribution of programs into folders has been added. GNOME 40 has replaced the vertical orientation with the horizontal one and made changes similar to the reorganization of the overview mode.
center >As the user interacts with window thumbnails in overview mode, panning and zooming are dynamically performed. Horizontal orientation is recognized as more intuitive than vertical orientation. Navigation in overview mode is done in two-dimensional space – movement to the right and left is used to move between virtual desktops, and up and down to navigate between overview mode and the list of applications.
