unity-design team mailing list archive

[Diego Moya <turingt@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 28 April 2010 08:24, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> On 28/04/10 14:21, Diego Moya wrote:
>> How is this expected to work on touchscreens, where the pointing
>> device lacks a real mouseover action? Will it rely on a hard key being
>> available?
> In cases where the touch screen is supplementary (i.e., you have a
> notebook, with mouse and keyboard *and* touch screen), folks will use
> the keyboard or mouse when using the menu.

Notebooks don't always have a mouse connected, and then you won't take
advantage of the touch screen? My point is that the design should
degrade gracefully to be usable for basic cases and take advantage of
the available input devices, even if their exact features vary
slightly (i.e. mouse versus stylus pointing).

I'm thinking more of tablet-like smartphones and notebooks with a
sliding, detachable or bluetooth keyboard, which is available for
advanced use cases but shouldn't be relied upon for the basic
interaction idioms.

This strategy would also be great for accessibility. Think people with
disabilities using non-standard pointing devices. A design whose basic
idioms are suitable for touch-screen only would be easier to adapt to
the needs of their environment than one that depends on the more
powerful mouse interactions.


>
> In pure-touch cases (like tablets) we would not recommend using apps
> which require the use of traditional menus at all.


What is the planned scope for Ubuntu mobile? This sound as if you're
planning to support only netbooks in your mobile platform, and maybe
have a different environment for tablets with applications
specifically tailored to mobile usage. With no accommodation for
applications migrated from the desktop. Are you not looking for a
design that would scale to work on both environments, with or without
mouse-and-keyboard?