unity-design team mailing list archive

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 7:58 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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> Roth Robert wrote on 03/05/10 13:22:
>>...
>> Starting a new topic to discuss the suggestions, comments, ideas
>> regarding the windicators
>> <http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/333> Mark blogged about.
>>...
>
> With help from Ted Gould of the DX team, I have now (mostly) finished a
> specification for windicators, with a few examples.
> <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Ayatana/Windicators>
>

Oh, nice! Thanks for doing this.

I am still confused about the exact scope of Windicators, though.
“Controlling status” is a pretty broad term, given the many roles
developers already give to status bars.

As far as I can tell, in a decently designed interface, most controls
are going to reflect their current status. For example the Status
selector in Empathy, the Timeline / Object Properties in Blender 2.5,
or the Font selector in any word processor. Should all of these
controls be in the status bar, and now Windicators?

Most of these mockups look like they would be equally relevant whether
the windicator is shown on an actual window in the workspace, a
minimized window or a shaded window. The Evolution windicator, for
example, could be used with its main window in a shaded state in order
to change the view mode, which would still do the right thing. That's
a pretty cool thing, I think. A bit like Windows's Jump Lists, but
specific to windows instead of applications.
(And a quick note about Evolution: 2.30 has evolution-express. Try
evolution --express from the command line. It's used in Meego and it
is awesome).

However, the mockups for F-Spot and The Gimp are different. Those only
fit the presentation of whatever is being shown inside a window. I see
no benefit in having the zoom and units controls in the window chrome.
It is wrong to have them in the status bar (it would be okay if the
thing wasn't called the status bar), but it is just as wrong to put
them in the window's title bar.

Also, keep in mind that The Gimp is moving to a single window UI. With
that in place, it would be incredibly illogical to have zoom / units
Windicators (which are document-specific) appearing in the context of
the entire application.

This needs more rules, and some good tests to decide when things fit.


Thanks,
Dylan