unity-design team mailing list archive

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 3:26 PM, David Callé <davidc@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> As a non native english speaker, this mail won't be long. I will just
> share some assertions that I believe being true for a vast majority of
> users.
>
> 1) When I see my mouse cursor on my desktop, it means my computer is
> ready for action.
>
> 2) When the mouse cursor is acting strange (like disappearing or slowly
> moving), it means that there is something wrong with my computer.
>
> 3) My mouse cursor is my virtual hand. When I don't use my real hands, I
> move them away and I wouldn't want them to "disappear" whenever I don't
> use them.
>
> 4) Interacting with my computer include relying on several states of my
> mouse cursor (busy, active, ready to grab or to interact). Make it
> disappear and I have lost an indicator of an essential state of my
> computer : its ability or not, to do things.
>
> 5) When I don't see my cursor before moving it, it's like not seeing my
> taskbar and having to alt-tab.
>
> And the last two, maybe the most important ones :
>
> 6) When I see my mouse cursor, I instinctively know the amount of
> movement my hand or finger will need to take it to another place of the
> screen.
>
> 7) It's easier to define the future trajectory of an immobile object,
> than having to catch a moving object with my eye first, then redefining
> it's trajectory.
>
> That's why I think having unclutter by default is not such a good idea
> (even if the omnipresence of the mouse cursor is a challenging usability
> and design problem). We should try to think about redesigning it (the
> hard way), before deciding to give it an invisible state when idle (the
> easy way).
>
> Thanks for reading!
> Davidc
>
>

Just thought I should mention: unclutter makes it impossible to use
both the keyboard and the mouse to navigate a menu. It's a natural
approach for some (well, me) and it's really confusing when it doesn't
work.

I think some people may like this, but those people are far outweighed
by the huge number of users who are going to be hurt by the change. I
also get the feeling that it's a lot easier to opt in to unclutter
than opt out of it. If somebody notices their mouse pointer is
disappearing all the time in a painfully broken way that renders their
desktop unusable, they are not going to know to remove the “unclutter”
package. They'll just be annoyed, _maybe_ ask for help but more likely
assume it's how the operating system behaves.

If unclutter remains installed by default, it should be added to the
mouse preferences alongside "Locate Pointer." Here's a relevant bug
report:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unclutter/+bug/435831


Dylan