unity-design team mailing list archive

[Apoorva Sharma <appi2012@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sep 7, 2010, at 8:12 PM, Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 12:41, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Frederik Nnaji wrote on 05/09/10 12:22:
> >...
> > On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 01:17, Apoorva Sharma <appi2012@xxxxxxxxx
> >...
> >> I think the fact that the memenu even shows the state changing
> >> buttons even when chat is off is ridiculous. How is the user
> >> supposed to know that to turn those buttons useable, he has to go to
> >> a different menu?
> >...
> > Yeah, you can't control anything with em, yet the menu items are there..
> > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeMenu#Instant%20messaging%20statuses doesn't
> > specify MeMenu behaviour for that case, if you check "Use Cases".
> >...
> 
> It does specify the behavior, and it has since March. "Each item should
> be sensitive only if at least one of the accounts you have set up in
> Empathy supports that status, regardless of whether Empathy is currently
> running."
> 
> yes, i simply skipped this constraint, since it doesn't specify how the controls would get me out of "offline". That sort of behaviour is not being addressed, intentionally not, as i am beginning to understand..
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To me, insensitive items are very dangerous. The only use case should be for expressing functionality that has been disabled by a user action, that is, insensitive items should appear to the user without the user making them so. Otherwise, the user is only confused about how the functionality will be enabled, or wonder why space is being wasted by this unnecessary item. Items that have no functionality until the user enables them should simply not be shown until enabled.

For the MeMenu, I think that there should be a button to turn on chat, and only when turned on should the state changing buttons be shown. With this system, showing "offline" is unnecessary, because that would simply mean turning chat off, and thus the on/off switch would provide the functionality.