unity-design team mailing list archive

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

FWIW, here's a little explanation about what motivated me to write this:

i believe that the concept of abstract navigation is becoming mandatory.
Any human-friendly man machine interface deserves to move beyond spacial
axis vs time for navigation..
I think we can do more in terms of navigation than pan, scroll and turn
page., i.e. physical movement.

The human mind is able to understand concepts far beyond physical movement
along a spacial axis. We dance and swim in water, soil and air
simultaneously with our eyes closed..
How could spacial navigation ever be more important to such a being, than
conceptual navigation?

To be honest, i believe that the man machine interface was never more
retarded than with the increasing age of the desktop metaphor.

Files and folders are the models an Operating System uses to associate
content objects with other content objects.
The user should not be bothered with such details anymore!

We all want software technology interfaces to be helpful in that they make
life simpler with all that they can help us do..

I think we can consider software appliances to be our artificially augmented
sense of coordination;
imagine searching the www with only the usage of scrollbars and arrow keys:
unuseful.

Sense of coordination is a scaling factor for mental capacity. meaning for
the ability to identify a known concept when it appears. The system has the
ability to re-cognize abstract concepts, as soon as it is able to coordinate
virtual relationships between their elements.

To put it in other words: Spacial navigation interfaces are useless on
invisible objects.
I'd go even further and say: never display unmanaged content.
Don't display stuff if it doesn't fit into the immediate purpose of
something i'm currently doing.

when i'm looking for a file for example, i am not interested in seeing any
other files, so searching for one particular document is more important than
displaying all of them simultaneously, spacially organized.

We need to give "navigating" a serious lift.
To achive this, it would help to put logical navigation into the foreground
wherever spacial navigation would obviously be more tedious to perform, i.e.
invisible content.

The reason is simple, or let me say simplicity itself!
The sea of invisible (virtual) objects in the world of software technology
is so overwhelming, that simple ways of navigating it are yet to be
produced..

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 16:05, Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Hello dear CompizConfig Developers in this list, if there are any.. are
> there any?
>
> A great thank you for how you did the search filter in CompizConfig
> Settings Manager, that's the kind of filter that makes sense.
> The gtkfilechooser module was reinvented in Sezen, still its legacy or
> better to say "aging" version deserves some love i say!
>
> let'S give the quick search filter another look real quick here:
>
> in CompizConfig Settings Manager, our main control interface to the window
> manager software control, the search filter for text elements is openly
> visible, affording itself to the user:
> There are too many controls to fit into one page, so a UI object should
> provide for a way to instantly focus initially invisible objects.
> A scrollbar doesn't give instant access to an object, as a visually
> optimized list or gallery would for example do.
>
> ¹ check the attached screener for visual reference!
> ² how would this look on all scrollable pages in 10.10 (pages or dialogs,
> unable to display all of their content at once automagically) ?
>
> greetings..
>