unity-design team mailing list archive

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

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 11:36, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> The items in the status menus are shortcuts. Sometimes someone will go
> into the clock menu to change something about the time, or the sound
> menu to change something about the sound, etc, before realizing that the
> menu itself doesn't contain the setting they want. But that's okay,
> because at the end of the menu there's a shortcut to the relevant
> settings pane.
>

That's precisely why i think it would be great to have 1 configuration
shortcut on the bottom of the Session Menu.
That shortcut should open the Power Preferences, perfectly corresponding
with the vertically opposite end of the menu, which is decorated with the
Power symbol.
This way, the power symbol on top of the Session Menu would make actual
sense for the first time imo, since "Power Settings" would be the first item
in that menu actually employing the word Power. I can't remember the last
time i opened Power Preferences from the "Battery Menu" aka "Power Menu",
besides it tends to disappear when the power cord is connected..

The most difficult thing for a user to abstract is the combined function of
a menu. Is it a category indicator, we'd better not leave it up to the user,
to decide, what category is meant.
Session Menu and Power Preferences have more in common to me than the
"Charging Indicator", which as mentioned above is not even persistent by
default.

I imagine opening a Session Menu > "Session Preferences", one day containing
the vital parts of Power Preferences, Screensaver Preferences and one or two
options that could be regarded as Session Preferences. I also believe that
it would make sense to have Preferences Windows and dialogs always open in
the same position: snapped to the top-right corner. The current behaviour is
that they appear center stage, and that is a bit confusing quite often.

I'd also say that one categorie's preferences replace another's, so that
there are never two preferences windows open simultaneously.
Once THAT works, there's again less clutter and changing something about the
preferences of some part of Ubuntu would feel more interactive and more
menu-like than the current implementation.

There's a lot more to say, but i think it's best kept back until this topic
proves worthy of discussion.