I would draw a distinction between touch friendly and touch optimized, and while I agree with what MPT said about Unity and Ubuntu not being optimized for touch (mainly because of the applications), there is nothing wrong with making interfaces touch friendly (usable on, but not optimized for, touch displays).
And while menus in current form are not touch optimized, mainly due to small target area, I don't get this dismissal of menus as an UI element altogether,it makes no sense. How would you propose applications rich in functionality expose that functionally, by cluttering the interface to oblivion, using arcane gestures?
Cheers,
Mitja
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Shuttleworth" <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "ayatana" <ayatana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2011 4:16:53 PM
Subject: Re: [Ayatana] I don't think global menu and the panel is good for a touch OS
On 18/01/11 18:09, Conscious User wrote:
>
>> They are very different things, and a design that works well for one
>> will hardly ever work well for the other.
>
> I'm a little bit confused now because Mark's blog post about Unity
> clearly stated that some design decisions were motivated by touch
> devices. Is the Unity design still taking touch into consideration
> or this was completely dropped once it was decided that Desktops
> would use it too?
No. Menu's are inherently antagonistic to touch. They are not
salvageable in their current form, so we're making no effort to do so.
As MPT has said clearly here, if you want to make a touch friendly
*app*, you need to use touch friendly styling and gestures. And not
depend on menus at all.
Utouch makes that easy to do, but you won't get "touchiness" for free in
the app, you have to design for it. Similarly, we didn't get it for free
in the shell, we had to design for it.
Mark
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