Ed Lin please review the comments and answers I've provided:
"You can't see what's running at a glance without hovering the
launcher. Why? Does it make sense for the user? Does it increase
usability? I doubt so, it's just for aesthetic reasons."
There you just pointed to the exact problem I'm trying to address! If you look at the first frame of the mockup you see the current setup, the programs that are running have an illuminated background together with the arrow on the left side. But that illuminated background is hard to see due to the icon set.
"Icons are completely desaturated, this makes finding what you are
looking for more difficult. Only shape, not color is different, now
imagine working on a glossy screen outdoors."
Usually, at least for me, people know the location of a launcher without seeing it. E.g. I know that "home" is on top, then comes firefox, thunderbird, liferea feed reader, playonlinux, banshee, etc. And the dream situation would to have this as a configurable option to turn this feature on or off, depending on if you think it's required with your icon set.
"I think both can be solved with one solution: make the icons
darker/more transparent but keep the color."
Together with the above setting for turning this feature on or off a simple slider could be implemented to set how many percent the icons should be grayed out.
"However I'd reserve that for hidden applications and instead add a
glow effect like GNOME 3 for running applications."
... That is exactly how it is implemented right now ... haven't you even tried tweaking Unity with CCSM?
2011/5/3 Ed Lin
<edlin280@xxxxxxxxx>
On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 2:13 PM, Niklas Rosenqvist> Here I have the finished mockup of how this configurable feature could
> work. For the future, what is the best way to share images with the
> ayatana mailing list? Is it by attaching the image to the email or
> upload it like I've done now?
>
> Here is the link:
>
http://i.imgur.com/bnIAE.png
>
Two things:
You can't see what's running at a glance without hovering the
launcher. Why? Does it make sense for the user? Does it increase
usability? I doubt so, it's just for aesthetic reasons.
Icons are completely desaturated, this makes finding what you are
looking for more difficult. Only shape, not color is different, now
imagine working on a glossy screen outdoors.
I think both can be solved with one solution: make the icons
darker/more transparent but keep the color.
However I'd reserve that for hidden applications and instead add a
glow effect like GNOME 3 for running applications. Actually, I'm not
convinced the visibility of running apps needs to be improved at all.
The whole point of a dock is to blur the line between starting apps
and switching to apps (abstract it away from the user). If you
disagree with this decision the dock isn't for you (install tint2 or
something).
Or remove all icons from the launcher and exclusively use the dash for
launching.