unity-design team mailing list archive

[David Siegel <david.siegel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<cringe>

If you are designing an interface, and suddenly you believe you need
to add a "bucket", this is a good sign that your initial design failed
somewhere. I would encourage you to "shelve the bucket" and revisit
your earlier assumptions. Shake things up a bit and ask yourself "what
could I do differently so that I don't need a 'bucket'?" Challenge
yourself to make a fundamental change to your design so the bucket
isn't needed.

As Mark pointed out, this additional entity is not needed, and the
Launcher should not contain unnecessary parts!

David

On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 5:49 PM, Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> My comments below are written from the perspective of Unity, because (a)
> that's what I'm running, and (b) that's where our design conversations can
> have the most immediate impact.
>
> On 16/05/10 15:30, Sense Hofstede wrote:
>
> An application bucket where you can dump applications you don't want to take
> space sounds like a neat idea. The applications could stay in there, even
> when they're running and have got the focus -- this could be indicated by
> placing the focus triangle at the bucket icon (the bucket icon is distinct
> from application by a different background colour or a border around its
> icon (what icon?)).
>
> The Unity Launcher shows running applications.
>
> If the app fits one of the Category Indicators, like the Messaging Menu or
> Sound Menu, it may also show as "running" there, with the same visualization
> (currently, a little triangle).
>
> I think it's reasonable to have apps which *don't* show in the Launcher, but
> are still running. I'd like to hear from MPT, cc'd, on the subject.
>
> I'm not sure if it's worth making that an explicit configuration option
> (those cost a knuckle at least, remember ;-)). I've seen spec's from MPT
> where that behavior is sometimes implicit (you close a music player window,
> and it keeps running in the background if a song was playing but not
> otherwise), but I'm a bit uncomfortable with that myself, because I'm not
> sure what the IM analogy would be.
>
> But I would object to a third catch-all place where windows might "sometimes
> go", which is how I interpret your "application bucket". The launcher is
> basically that bucket already, and Category Indicators should suffice for
> things which are running but which we consider more like "services" than
> applications; we don't need a third place as well.
>
> Mark
>
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