unity-design team mailing list archive

[Daniel Silva <raditzman@xxxxxxxxx>]

 I think Vincent Moulin hit the nail in the head with his idea of windows not 
maximized having their menus inside of them instead of the top. I've found 
myself feeling a bit confused as to what app did the global menu belong to, when 
working with multiple, unmaximized windows, something I always feel when using 
Mac OS X (specially when I want to open a menu item of a non-focused window: in 
these cases I have to click the titlebar of the app, *then* access the global 
menu. Also sometimes  I often make the assumption that the global menu is the 
menu of the unfocused window). Also I think the purpose of the global menu (to 
increase available height) looses its purpose on unmaximed windows, because in 
those cases the user isn't trying to optimize his viewing area, so to speak. 
Because if he were, he could just maximize it and get the bonus space at top. 
Also the time you spend back and forth with your mouse moving from the 
unmaximized window to the global menu convinces me that Vincent Moulin's idea is 
the best way to go.

There is only one problem, windows that don't get maximized, yet are big enough 
to fill the available area, in this case there is a tremendous waste of space, 
with the empty global menu on top, the titlebar of the window, and the local 
menu bar of the app, and only then the app itself. Of course you could say that 
the user would understand that by maximizing the app the free space dedicated to 
the app would increase, but I don't know how clever users are in this respect 
(some kind of test could clarify this). One possible solution to this "problem" 
(I'm not sure if it's really a big issue, I mean, users should get that to 
increase space they could maximize the app, right?) is to make it so that all 
apps open maximized, but then there's the problem of users who want to just open 
a little program, like a text editor, or a file manager window (or two),  to 
edit some small script, move or copy a file from here to there (or having a 
small script in a small editor program, and a console open to run/compile it), 
 For these users, having all apps maximized is contrary to what they are used 
to, and may push them away from unity.

So, what do you guys think?

Daniel