unity-design team mailing list archive

["Paulo J. S. Silva" <pjssilva@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>    It certainly doesn't sound like "I am because of my community", it
>   sounds like "I am because of what Mark likes to see". Scary in a way.


>This can also work the other way around. I could say that your
> my-customized-to-the-last-pixel-way-or-the-highway stance is a pretty selfish one, and
> that someone who is willing to sacrifice >some of his own very personal needs and
> desires in order to work on what the large majority of
> people actually need and can use is a much better community member.
> What do you think about this?

In my humble opinion this is one of best ways to end a conversation:
takes your "opponent" point of view and turn it into a caricature that
make it sound unreasonable.

As far as I can see Owens point is that we don't need such a radical
"one size fits it all" minding set because that is not really possible
in all cases. One size does not fit it all always. I don't think that
everybody else that asked for customizations wanted
"my-customized-to-the-last-pixel-way-or-the-highway". Usually we ( I
have already asked for customization in this list) want a way-out from
what we consider bad UI decisions that are really making our life
worse when using Ubuntu.

For example in the osd-notify positioning, adding the possibility of
selecting one of the corners would be enough. It would be certainly
enough also to hide such option requiring gconf-editor to change it.

Can't we just see that in some cases it is *really hard* if not
impossible to find a default setting that would not step on many
peoples toes and add a gconf-entry to select it? If an UI decision,
for example, generates a bug reports with hundreds of comments it may
be a good indication that the decision is not good for a very large
number of people even if it is good for most of the people. Then we
can work really hard to find the best default setting without really
left part of our community behind.

best,

Paulo

Obs: I want to make one point clear. I am not defending that we should
add hidden options for everything. However I am defending we should be
open to the feedback and see that in some cases not having an option
is a bad decision. I have been reading this list for some months now
and up to now I could only see two cases where an option would be
clearly beneficial. The notifications position is one of them.