unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Vishnoo wrote on 07/08/10 19:59:
>
> On Sat, 2010-08-07 at 14:46 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas
>...
>> In Ubuntu 9.10 and later, the application icon does not appear in the
>> window title bar, partly for the same reason (it's not relevant to
>> user goals).
>
> You seem to be contradicting yourself. ;)
> <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557469#c1>
> "A menu item should have an icon only if it represents a dynamic
> object such as an application, file, device, or user, or if it makes
> the items in that menu segment very much more recognizable"
>
> If an application icon in a menu makes it more recognizable ,
> how is it not relevant to the user goals?

I'm not suggesting that there should be an app menu but that it should
not use the application icon. What I'm suggesting is that most of the
time, when you're using a window, you don't need to see the application
brand *at all*.

Now, sometimes the application name still needs to be used in the
window's title bar, because there is no relevant document name to show
instead (for example, Calculator, F-Spot, or Rhythmbox). Here it could
go either way: we could be consistent either with other window titles,
which don't have an icon, or with menu items representing applications,
which do. I think it's better to be consistent with other window titles,
because the history of operating systems is a history of things that
used to be separate applications slowly being merged into the OS or into
other applications, so branding windows would cause churn. (To use
another Ubuntu example for a moment, with apologies to those who use
other OSes: Once all graphical package management is handled by Ubuntu
Software Center and Update Manager, "Software Sources" will no longer
need to be presented as a separate application with its own name and
icon. It'll be much the same window as it was before, just without a
distinct brand.)

>...
>> If you have a document open in Microsoft Word and a spreadsheet open
>> in Microsoft Excel, and you choose "Quit" from Excel's application
>> menu on the Mac (or "Exit" from its Office button on Windows), the
>> spreadsheet will close. But if you had the same document open in
>> OpenOffice.org Writer, and the same spreadsheet open in
>> OpenOffice.org Calc, and you chose "Quit" from OpenOffice.org's app
>> menu in Gnome Shell, the spreadsheet would close, and -- surprise!
>> -- the document would close too.
>
> You are /not/ completely right here. We do have Close and Exit in
> OO.o. We can close one spreadsheet and have the other document open
> too.

There's no contradiction there. "Close" does the same in both suites,
but that's not the problem. The problem is that "Quit" would do
different things.

> Btw, Why is this an argument against the app-menu? Shouldnt we just
> find a way to expose right option here?

Because "Quit" is given as the first example of an item justifying the
menu's existence at all.

> Now again , why isnt the app-menu ideal? because of a few bugs or
> improper names in the app-menu?
> What is it that makes it completely nonsensical to use such an
> app-menu?
>...

To sum up: Because it increases cognitive load by showing branding at a
time when it isn't relevant, and because most of the items proposed for
it either should not exist or could sensibly be somewhere else.

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/

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