unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Dylan McCall wrote on 22/04/10 04:50:
>...
> First of all, I think it would be worth investigating sound effects
> attached to indicators. Doing it through the indicator applet means we
> can (if desired) use Canberra's awesome ca_gtk_play_for_widget function
> (which means beautiful positional audio).

I don't understand why sound effects would be attached to individual
menus. Can you give an example or two?

> Secondly, I think it's really important to explore the window list at
> this point. As others have mentioned, this is all doing a nice job of
> establishing what certain APIs are for and making sure they don't get
> misused. However, we're lacking a replacement for one of the more
> popular misuses: notification icons for minimization.

Yes.

> One thing that occurs to me is to change the window list into a more
> physical place that you can move windows to. So, "minimized" windows
> appear there, and are available there, no matter what workspace you're
> on. It would no longer list windows unless they are minimized. Pretty
> substantial change, but maybe I can do a mockup or something if
> anyone's interested :)

I'm interested. :-)

>...
> I was a bit worried upon reading “And further, everything is becoming a
> single set of menus.” I could be interpreting it wrong, but this sounds
> like everything is going to be stuck in the same space at the top right
> even though they are all neatly categorized. I think there should be
> separation between these different categories of indicators in some
> form. For example, substantial whitespace between app indicators
> (including indicator-messages) and system-related indicators (battery,
> session). Are we on the same page?
>...

The history of operating systems is a history of applications getting
sucked in to the base system. The clock used to be a separate
application; now it's a standard part of the environment. Connecting to
the Internet used to be a separate utility; now it's a standard part of
the environment. IM status used to be in application-specific widgets;
with the me menu we're attempting to make it a standard part of the
environment.

I expect this slow trend to continue. A simple example is the battery
status menu, which is currently a custom one (a patch to
gnome-power-manager) but will soon migrate to the system area. So custom
to systemic is a continuum, and I don't think it's useful to have a
visual barrier between them. The system ones will be grouped at the end
of the panel, and in a fixed order, and that's probably enough.

Cheers
- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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