How do you get gnome-shell to show the full name?
Solution 1:
I played around with the gnome-shell.css (/usr/share/themes/[your-current-theme]), after I copied that folder to /home/user/.themes. In the gnome-shell.css is a section called Apps where you can change the grid size of the grid on which the icons are aligned - if you make that bigger (change contact grid entry accordingly) you will see more.
I also tried to find how the pop-ups, like on the overview sidebar, work - however I could not find that. Seems like that has nothing to do with CSS.