The activities indicator has landed 🚀
Thanks to @verdre for the prototype extension, Georges for implementing it in a clean way, and @fmuellner for timely reviews!
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/2902
A bit of history, as a curiosity: We've long wanted to replace the Activities button with something nicer, but finding a good replacement proved difficult given the constraints (e.g. needs wide enough to be clickable and generic enough to stand for searching, switching, launching, etc).
This old issue has a bunch of random ideas for alternatives: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/3590
A few months ago I stumbled across this extension (https://www.omglinux.com/space-bar-gnome-extension), which sparked the idea of having a dynamic indicator rather than just a static icon.
We used the extension it for some very hacky experiments, e.g. this from @cassidy:
This seemed promising enough that @verdre built a proper extension for it, which implements the exact visuals and behavior we wanted (though still very hacky code-wise).
This is what we showed off during the design state of the union talk at GUADEC:
We used this extension to extensively test the behavior, both on ourselves (by daily driving it) and as part of a series of informal user interviews.
One interesting learning from those interviews was that for a lot of people "abstract symbol I don't know" intuitively translates to "menu".
Even though the indicator doesn't have a direct reference to "apps", people tended to click the pill in the top left without thinking when asked to launch apps, since it looked like a menu to them.
