"GNOME Shell
"Jon McCann from Red Hat ran the first Shell session, on design. An amazing amount of progress had been made since the hackfast one year prior that spawned the Shell project, but some major tasks remained. Fortunately, Red Hat decided to fund full-time work on the Shell, so progress was being made quickly (and still is).
"Jon focused on the Shell UI as it stood then, and still is today. He said that the top bar had been redesigned. The right-hand side showed session-oriented actions (things that would apply to the entire session). A clock and date widget were in the center, “balancing” the top bar to provide an even distribution of content across the width of the screen. The far left-hand side held the “Activities” menu, which activated an overview mode.
"Between “Activities” and the clock widget, a dropdown menu would show the current application.
"Some examples of session-oriented actions:
"Your presence (now implemented)
Login and -out
Messaging
The control center
Your own account information
The notification tray stays in the same area as the session-oriented menu, but with encouragement to use a new messaging API that would display it in a different location."
