unity-design team mailing list archive

[andrea azzarone <aazzarone@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Now Unity Desktop integrates (and hide) the menu bar in the upper panel both for the maximized windows and unmaximized ones. This is the reasons according to Mark Shuttleworth:«One of the design goals of Unity is to reduce the clutter of the desktop, another is to use space more efficiently.We hide the menu by default in Unity because the menu provides no useful information to which you can refer just by looking at it, but it puts a lot of detail on the screen which is visual clutter. So, we’ve taken the view that the menu is there if you need it (by moving the mouse to it or pressing Alt) but otherwise isn’t in your view.Many modern applications are doing without a menu altogether, so in our view, this is a step towards the future, and it will encourage application developers to think about their interfaces and make them more usable by design rather than depending on the crutch of a menu.»Why not integrate (and hide) the menu bar in the title bar instead for ummaximized windows?I have realized a simple mockup that shows my idea. The menu bar will be show only if the menu is over the title bar.However, there are some implementation issues:- if the menu bar is shown in the title bar, how do I use it to drag/maximize/unmaximise the window?- what about if the menu bar is bigger than the title bar?The second is not a real problem: the classic Gnome cut the menu bar if it is bigger than the windows. For the first problem there are different solutions. For example we can use the left button mouse for use the menu bar and the right button mouse for use the title bar (drag, maximize/unmaximized with double click). Or we can add another window control that allows us to drop the windows.
Link to the mockup: http://arlecchino92.deviantart.com/art/Menu-bar-title-bar-in-Unity-197776814 and http://www.ubuntusecrets.it/2011/02/mockup-menu-integrato-nella-barra-del-titolo/