Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
The position is final for 9.10 but can certainly be reconsidered for Lucid.The factors that need to be considered are: * fitting things into the corner is most aesthetically pleasing* the "synchronous" notifications (like brightness and volume) are fixed in size* the async notifications (IM's etc, things that happen elsewhere, not in response to a keypress) are variable sized and can grow vertically* sliding things around when something else grows is really bad, it is unpredictable and frustrating for a user trying to look at the thing that suddenly moves, so: - synchronous should not be below async (so that it does not have to slide down) - the bottom right corner doesn't work (because then async has to grow "upwards")
[snip more explanatory awesomeness] Hello.Lurker here, but this is too good to pass up, and even ties in with the "closed design list" discussion. Am I the only person who thinks that reading the previous email from Mark listing the factors, contraints and things that were tried makes the decisions that were reached and end result (in this case for the Notify-OSD for karmic) *much* more understandable?
I personally think it'd be really nice (and useful) if something like the previous email from Mark was made available for every large UI change that Ubuntu makes. (I don't know... I'm thinking of something similar to the Python PEPs... Maybe even with links from the html version of the release notes, like the PEPs.) That way people who are not entirely happy about a change to the UI can understand the constraints under which said change was made, and then make more informed and constructive criticism at the very least.
Christian