unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Brett Cornwall wrote:
> Hello, I'm bringing attention to the mailing list that there's a fair
> amount of displeasure at the newly designated spot for notify-osd. You
> may read the entire bug report/thread here:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/notify-osd/+bug/438536
>
> In a nutshell, quite a lot of users found that Jaunty's behavior was
> stellar enough, and that this idea of reserving the top part for
> things like volume control are a bit too extreme. We can understand
> your motives, but we feel like it just doesn't work. We kindly ask you
> all to reconsider this.

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")

 * the top right corner has a lot of stuff there - window decorations,
tabs, tab controls (new tab, close tab etc) and in many apps, a search
input. So even though the look-through and click-through is *cool*, it's
still better not to put async right into the top right corner

For 9.10, two positions were considered and tried:

In both cases, we put sync above and async below, to avoid sliding
problems. We put them on the right hand side of the screen, as that's a
less-used area.

In the first case, we used the midpoint of the right side of the screen
and placed the notifications there, with sync above and async below. It
seems slightly odd to have them "hanging in space", but they conflict
with far less content there. This was the plan for 9.10. However, when
it landed, there were a lot of complaints saying that folks didn't like
it "out of a corner".

As a compromise, we moved to plan b, which was to put them in the top
right, with sync above. That means that the common case, with async
notifications, appears to leave a "gap". But it also avoids the worst
overlaps with things like window and tab controls, and usually also the
search bar.

That's where we settled for 9.10. For 10.04 I would like to revisit the
midpoint of the right hand side. I would not want to rehash old
territory, so please factor in the above in proposing new ideas. I'm of
the view that this decision involves at least one ugly compromise no
matter which way it goes, and am happy to make the call so far (i.e.
happy to be the one with the thick skin).

If there is an implementation which avoids the issues and is sane, I'd
love to include it.

Mark

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