unity-design team mailing list archive

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 03:53, Apoorva Sharma <appi2012@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> 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.
>

yeah, insensitive items have their disadvantages.
In this particular case, the advantage is, that you know where to find them,
and you can verify that, even when they are disabled. A central point for
broadcasting about "Me", setting the Presence state for "Me" and changing
information and account settings for "Me" is a viable concept, that can help
the novice user find her way through Ubuntu's DE.


> 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.
>

if the ON/OFF switch you are proposing (i like) were to be positioned above
the insensitive state items, it would be easy to discover how Presence items
and "Chat ON/OFF" relate..
In that case, it wouldn't be absolutely necessary to hide the Presence
items, when Chat is off.
Personally, i can imagine both cases to be cool..