Re: [Ayatana] Design problem: Menus hidden by default in Unity

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Saleel Velankar wrote on 16/03/11 12:33:
> On Wednesday, March 16, 2011 11:00:35 AM Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> 
>> (It would be interesting to replace maximization with a standard
>> function that really *does* make "all the available screen space ...
>> dedicated to this window".)
> 
> This is one of the most hated features in osx, imo. It takes control
> away from the user, and heads to very inconsistent results across
> different applications.

Mac OS X doesn't have any such feature. (Though apparently Mac OS X 10.7
is going to introduce something like it.)

>> Mac OS X has that in the Help menu for every application.
>> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOoOvIqiWe0#t=22s> But searching works
>> only if you are already confident that the application does the exact
>> thing you're looking for. If you aren't, you still need to be able to
>> browse the functions of the application. Menus are an
>> information-dense way of presenting those functions.
> 
> True. I believe in this proof of concept: http://www.afiestas.org/improving-
> kde-applications-help-menu-actions-lookup/ ; the dev mitigated this a bit by 
> also letting the search go through the tooltips of the menu options.

Right. That's basically the same thing, but without the benefit of
teaching you where the original is.

>> The difficulty there is that the menu bar would be flickering from the
>> menus to the title at a moment when you're probably trying to
>> concentrate on something else.
> 
> cant we add an animation to purposefully slow down the flicker to
> something understandable? I mean when the launcher is hidden there is a
> visual cue to where it has gone, why not the same for a menu about to
> be hidden?
>...

I don't think that would make it less distracting -- the problem would
still be that something far away from your locus of attention is moving
at all. For an example of this problem, see the Unity launcher right
now, whenever it's full enough to need to collapse some items: when you
aim for something near the top of the launcher, the items near the
bottom wiggle.

- -- 
mpt
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