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

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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After several weeks of trying, last week I finally succeeded in
installing Natty to test Unity.

I was disappointed to see that in Unity, menus are invisible until you
mouse over where they are supposed to be. For a window, until you mouse
over it, the space reserved for its menus is taken up by an application
or window title. And for the desktop, until you mouse over it, the space
for its menus is completely empty. I reported a bug about this, but John
Lea marked it as Invalid on the grounds that "this change request
contradicts the design". He requested that I discuss it here.

The design John cited is not the menu bar specification
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MenuBar>, but a separate "The Unity Menu"
document that is new to me.
<https://docs.google.com/View?id=dfkkjjcj_1776g5ztgbc3>

I see four major problems with hiding the menus and covering them with
an application or window title.

1.  Most importantly, it makes the menus much harder to use.

    The "The Unity Menu" document says that "The top level of the menu
    rarely shows significant information (it is not an indicator) - it
    consists essentially of category headings, like 'File' and 'Edit'
    and 'View'. None of those add any relevant information to the task
    at hand, or wider awareness."

    Whoever wrote that is mistaken. Every time the task at hand involves
    using a menu, it is necessary first to be aware of, and then to move
    the pointer to, the desired menu. That is much harder to do if the
    menu is invisible until just after you finish needing to know where
    it is. Whether the menus collectively are "an indicator" is
    irrelevant: the first item in the rationale, for what determines
    whether something appears in the menu bar, has always been "It's
    not whether it's a status indicator".
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MenuBar?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=whether-something-appears.jpg>

2.  It makes some functions effectively invisible.

    For example, last month Jack Wallen wrote for TechRepublic
    <http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/x/2291>: "One of the
    most handy menu entries in GNOME (for me at least) is the Connect
    to Server entry in the Places menu. This allows the user to connect
    to nearly any type of server quickly and easily. The user can even
    connect to a Windows Share from here. In Unity - you won’t find
    that. In fact, you will be hard pressed to find any means to
    connect to a server in Ubuntu Unity."

    At the time, I didn't understand how he could have had that problem.
    Now I do. The "Connect to Server" item, which is in the "Places"
    menu on the Ubuntu 10.10 desktop, is in the "File" menu on the
    Natty desktop. But the desktop appears, incorrectly, to have no
    menus at all.

    The "The Unity Menu" document says "Many modern applications are
    being designed without substantial menus". The problem with that
    approach was explained in my initial post introducing the menu bar:
    it results in gratuitous inconsistency between applications.
    <http://design.canonical.com/2010/05/menu-bar/#history> But that is
    beside the point. Hiding menus for windows that *do* rely on them
    does nobody any good.

3.  The application or window title becomes ugly when the menus appear.

    For example, when using Nautilus's menus, the menu bar reads
        File Man File Edit View Go Bookmarks Help.

    Similarly when using Terminal's menus, the menu bar reads
        Termina File Edit View Search Terminal Help.

    And when using Calculator's menus, the menu bar gets a stutter:
        Calculat Calculator Mode Help.

4.  The application or window title and the title bar are redundant, and
    sometimes inconsistent too.

    For example, when that Calculator window is open, its title bar says
    "Calculator", and the menu bar pointlessly repeats "Calculator".
    When a Banshee window is open, its title bar says "Banshee Media
    Player", and the menu bar repeats "Banshee Media Player". When a
    PolicyKit authentication alert is open, its title bar says
    "Authenticate", and the menu bar repeats "Authenticate".

    Other windows are inconsistent. For example, Firefox's title bar
    says "Mozilla Firefox", but the menu bar disagrees, saying
    "Firefox Web Browser". Shotwell's title bar says "Shotwell", but
    the menu bar says "Shotwell Photo Manager". Most amusingly, if you
    open a presentation in LibreOffice and then open an accompanying
    spreadsheet, the title bar says "LibreOffice Calc" while the menu
    bar says "LibreOffice Impress".

There are two paragraphs in the "The Unity Menu" document that I agree
with. One says: "The top edge of the screen has some advantages for fine
mouse pointer targeting." But that is true only when you know where the
target area is before you begin. The other says: "Screen space is
extremely valuable, and we prefer to use pixels for content that is
unique to the focused task, or wider awareness, than for chrome." Menus
are unique to the focused task. Application names are not.

I have a simple proposal to fix these problems: The application title
should be removed from Unity's menu bar. I'm reliably informed that this
would be extremely low risk, in that it would involve changing two lines
of code.

- -- 
mpt
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