The Toolbar

Hiding at the top of the screen is the Toolbar - you can find it by moving the cursor to the top of the screen (or by hitting the home button on your keyboard). Once you've finished with the Toolbar, move the cursor away. The Toolbar automatically hides to save precious screen space and allows you to concentrate on the tasks at hand.

Toolbar
The Moblin Toolbar

The Toolbar has 3 sections. The time and date on the left, a selection of panels in the middle, and system information items on the right.

toolbar reference
Toolbar Sections

Time and date area is view only. To change the time and date, see Settings.

toolbar active
Example of active Toolbar panel

Task item panels are core to the Moblin netbook experience. When you select a task item a panel appears. The panels act as a bridge between launching an application and providing information and context associated with the selected item.

Starting from the left, the Toolbar panels are:

toolbar_icon_myzone.png myzone
Provides a quick snapshot of activity on your netbook and within your social network.
toolbar icon status status panel
Allows you to instantly post your status updates to social networking services.
toolbar icon people people panel
See all your contacts in one place. Instantly know which of your friends are available to communicate with.
toolbar icon internet internet panel
Provides access to your currently running, favorite, and recently viewed websites. It also has an integrated automagic bar.
toolbar icon media media panel
Displays your recently played and viewed media files.
toolbar icon pasteboard pasteboard panel
A level up for copy and paste, this stores and manages multiple copied items from your netbook activity.
toolbar icon applications applications panel
Provides easy access to all of the applications on your netbook.
toolbar icon zones zones panel
Manages, organizes or switches to currently running applications.

System information items

The System Information items let you view and manage important parts of your system and adjust them accordingly.

The icons tell you all you need to know in one look, and offer all the available functionality in one easy click.

The panels are laid out with stored settings on the left-hand side and activation toggles and key tasks on the right-hand side.

toolbar system info
Example of active system information panel.

System information items:

toolbar system network Network connection
Manage network connections, Wifi, Ethernet, 3G, and WiMAX in one central location.
toolbar system volume Volume control
Turn volume up or down, mute, or turn alert sounds on or off.
toolbar system power Power
Show battery status, and adjust display brightness to conserve battery power.
toolbar system bluetooth Bluetooth
Coming soon!
System Tray
Many legacy Linux applications use a thing called a ‘system tray’ to stay around without cluttering up your screen too much. We think we’ve found a better way to do it with Zones but we’re always considering ways to make those other applications work brilliantly on your Moblin netbook.

Comments (6 total)

Tweaking the toolbar?

Moblin is really great for mobile uses. I can connect to internet via wifi and with a little bit tinkering 3g-phone/bt as well. Moblin loads and and shuts down pretty fast, which is really nice. Using moblin reminds pretty much using nokias internet tablet, simplicity is very cool thing.

But my needs does not include IM and twitter et al, I rather use browser and play along gnome-terminal. I wonder if it is possible to customize moblin toolbar and the m-zone to get rid off software I do not use? I have understood that this cannot be done via configuring installed system but rather tweaking the sourcecode instead.

Installing development tools seems to be pretty straightforward but where could a good starting points found for tweaking, say, the toolbar?

UI (system tray) settings

Some how I've managed to mess up my System Tray UI by changing screen settings to a lower resolution and powering off my netbook.

I used Applications->Settings->Screen Resolution(?) to change the screen settings and thought I've set them back to default resolution before turning the system off.

To my surprise, on subsequent boot up of my netbook the System Tray icons are too big to fit the screen and no longer show/have access to the Application icon (not visible) to go and change the screen resolution back to the defaul settings.

Is there a way or KeyBoard shortcut to gain access to the settings and change the screen resolution? Could I somehow boot to console and manually edit screen resolution settings?

I my humble opinion, not having an alternate way that is intuitive and which conduces to easily recover from such unintended actions, should be viewed as a shortcoming on the UI desgin. Other than that, I really like the Mobling system tray UI.

Cheers,

Eli

Keyboard Shorcuts for Toolbar?

The toolbar is nice, but it is too much mouse oriented. It will be nice to be able to use it just with the keyboard. Pressing the "windows" key to bring up the toolbar works well, but I cannot use the arrow keys to move to the panels.

It will be nice to configure the toolbar. In my case, I prefer to invoke it using the keyboard only, and usually get annoyed when it comes up when moving the mouse to the top of the screen.

bookmark

check the right hand side of the broser bar...you will see a "pin"..type a hyperlink which you want to bookmark it...and then move your cursor to "nail" the pin...

Moblin v2 beta

Looks very clean, loads quickly.
One problem I noted is that I could not find a way to bookmark websites on the browser. Also the toolbar seems to be heavily weighted to 'social networking' access. Hope there will be a way of removing the useless (to me) icons and deskspace (like Twitter) and replacing them with the utilities that I use most frequently.
Otherwise very impressive...keep up the good work.
SJF

Bookmark

check the right hand side of the broser bar...you will see a "pin"..type a hyperlink which you want to bookmark it...and then move your cursor to "nail" the pin...