unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

Great idea, vish!

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 15:00, Vishnoo <vish@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Wed, 2010-11-03 at 16:49 +0000, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> > Vishnoo wrote on 17/10/10 11:39:
> > >...
> > > We removed tooltips from gnome-panel and indicators because it did not
> > > add much value[1] and instead we choose to use icons that could quickly
> > > convey the same meaning.
> > >...
> > > Is there a reason Unity's Launcher has tooltips for applications and
> > > places? [While Application icons could be considered as unrecognizable,
> > > Places icons are our custom icons so they should atleast be a bit
> > > recognizable.Still not sure how these tooltips are more important...]
> > >...
> >
> > For the most part, menu title icons convey pretty simple ideas. Network,
> > sound, keyboard, power. And they stick around for a long time, so you
> > can learn them.
> >
> > Launcher items sometimes are simple items, but sometimes complex ones.
> > And often they don't stick around as long. For instance, you might
> > install a bunch of free programs that do the same thing, to compare them
> > before keeping just one, and their icons may look alike. That makes text
> > labels more useful for them.
>
> Yeah, It did seem like the problem we are trying to solve here.
> But when none of the other icons of the unity panel had tooltips it
> became annoying to me when the tooltips showed up for the launcher alone
> and I was quite familiar with the icons i was using.
>
> A user /might/ get used to the icon after a period of time and be able
> to recognize it without tooltips, at which point it might not be
> required for them.
>
> Why not add the window's preview as well?
>
> Now that Unity uses compiz and compiz 0.9 is able to do windows preview
> of *minimized* windows as well, why not use it in combination? [window
> preview + app name]
>
> Adding the window preview will give the user a chance to preview any
> changes in the other window without switching from the current
> application and loosing focus from the work.
>
> And it might be easier/quicker for a user to recognize the application
> from the app preview than from just the application name.
>

this works well in Windows7 as far as i can see.
Definitely something to think about..