unity-design team mailing list archive

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxx>]

It was repeatedly mentioned in bug reports, blog comments and forum
posts that Ivanka's post does not actually clarify anything.

It *does* mention important questions and it *does* say that developers
carefully considered those questions.

(and let me state very clearly that I'm *not* doubting such care
existed)

*However*, the post completely lacks any kind of conclusion. Something
in the lines of "in the end, the design team went with this position and
this ordering because of reasons X, Y and Z, and we believe that
problems A, B, C that this decision obviously causes are less important
than X, Y and Z".

To make things worse, it makes very clear that Ivanka *disagrees* with
the final decision. This makes very easy to put the tinfoil hat on and
assume that this was a decision "from the top" and not really the actual
result of discussions, regardless if they took place or not.

(again, let me state very clearly that I *don't* think those are
reasonable assumptions, I'm just pointing out where they come from)

The fact that several developers in Planet Ubuntu are going in the "you
can easily change it back" or "I got used to it" direction instead of
actually giving *concrete* usability arguments in favor of it (and the
few who do are just guessing them and not giving an official Canonical
position) does not help either, as pointed out by Scott Ritchie:

http://yokozar.org/blog/archives/194

I will repeat something I wrote in the bug report since this is the
Ayatana list and therefore sounds fitting: every single time a possibly
controversial change was proposed for Ubuntu, it came with a detailed
document on the reasoning behind it. It was this way for Notify OSD, the
Messaging Menu and now the Me Menu. Even the new color branding was
explained with a truckload of details by Mark in his blog.

Even the controversial Yahoo deal involved a long mailing list post
explaining its details. And when the deal was defended in Planet Ubuntu,
(most of) the developers *were* mirroring Canonical's oficial position
and were more or less in tune with it.

Please, do notice that my point is *not* the "you should listen to the
community and revert the decision" protests that are so easy to find
these last days. The problem is that people currently have no idea of
*which* reasoning exactly they should argue against. And for those
unsatisfied with the change, this leaves little choice but starting to
*guess* the reasoning behind the change *and* the silence.

I'm not saying a gigantic wiki is necessary. I'm not even saying that a
*satisfactory* answer is necessary. What I do believe is that
*something*, *anything at all* would be nice.

Will this silence the critics? Of course not, I'm not that naive. But it
will give the right people stable ground to write more constructive
criticism. It would be better than the current guessfest among users
*and* developers.


Le vendredi 12 mars 2010 à 15:26 +0100, Siegfried Gevatter a écrit :
> 2010/3/12 David Balch <david@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> > Please could the design team explain the rationale for moving the
> > window control buttons from the right to the left, and the benefits
> > expected to result.
> 
> http://www.ivankamajic.com/?p=281
> 
> (I don't like them at all on the left, btw.)