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

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxx>]

Ian Santopietro wrote:
> What about flashing the menu with the title for the first, say,
> five seconds that the window is open. That gives an indication as to
> where the menu is, reduces visual clutter, and allows the user to get
> a quick preview of what menu headers are available (File, Edit, etc.)
> without losing the supposed benefit of the global menu. Perhaps a nice
> quick fading animation would help keep this from being jarring.


Frankly, this sounds like the kind of heat-of-the-moment workaround
that brought Unity to its current state in the first place. The
impression I have is the current design is a pile of workarounds:

+ Let's merge the titlebar and the panel when the window is maximized
  and show the menubar. The title is not that important.

- Oops, now the menubar position differs in maximized windows because
  of the buttons.

- Ok, then let's fix it on that position.

- Oops, ugly gap for non-maximized windows.

- Ok, let's put the title there.

- Oops, titles can have different sizes.

- Ok, let's truncate it.

- Oops, this is ugly.

- Ok, let's show the entire title by default and the menu on hover.

- Oops, now it's inconsistent with maximized windows.

- Ok, let's do the same for maximized windows. Hey, this brings the
  title back for maximized windows. Win!

With admittedly some poetic license, this is how I picture it: a
series of local optimizations losing track of global optimization.

Instead of trying to fix the current situation, I prefer going
back to when the menubar was fully visible and the titlebar
didn't merge with the panel, and restarting to think from there.

My personal suggestion would be dropping the title in the panel as
mpt suggested, but keeping the idea of merging the titlebar and the
panel. This means dropping the title entirely in the maximized
case, yes. I don't think anyone would really care.

For fixing the gap, I'm going to suggest something controversial,
but that I wanted to suggest for a long time anyway: dropping the
minimize and maximize buttons, following Gnome3's direction and
under their same arguments.

This would leave only the space of a single close button to worry
about and this could be addressed by something with a fixed size
that does not need to be truncated: AN ICON.

Matter of fact, I WOULD suggest placing this icon even when the
window is maximized and storing a menu with window management
options in it, just like you already have depending on your
metacity settings. Close *is* a destructive function you
don't want near "File", after all... But I won't seriously
support this second suggestion for the moment, because I
suspect that would make closefests of maxmized windows too
inneficient, and this is bad for netbook users.

Thoughts?