unity-design team mailing list archive

[Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 03/15/2011 06:34 PM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

> I was disappointed to see that in Unity, menus are invisible until you
> mouse over where they are supposed to be. For a window, until you mouse
> over it, the space reserved for its menus is taken up by an application
> or window title. And for the desktop, until you mouse over it, the space
> for its menus is completely empty.

> The design John cited is not the menu bar specification
> <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MenuBar>, but a separate "The Unity Menu"
> document that is new to me.
> <https://docs.google.com/View?id=dfkkjjcj_1776g5ztgbc3>

And here I thought you 2 would be on the same team.

That switching behavior only makes sense to me in the maximised window 
case. I guess it's then shoehorned unto the non-max window case for 
consistency. Consistency is great, but sometimes there maybe a benefit 
in breaking it. Though it might be a design "smell", if your underlying 
concept drives you into such cases.

If menus are disliked that much, I wonder where the alternatives are? 
Piling everything up in one mega-menu is only acceptable for seldom used 
functionality. Many applications have way to many commands to put them 
into a toolbar or to sprinkle the interface with them.

Even in an application like Rhinocerus (rhino3d), where all commands are 
available in commandline at the bottom of the window, the menus help by 
letting you explore what's there and in case where you don't remember 
enough of a command name even for autocomplete. Though in Emacs, I have 
been doing fine with no menu at all.

Anyway, if menus are bad, menus where you can't aim for their top level 
items directly are even worse.


> I have a simple proposal to fix these problems: The application title
> should be removed from Unity's menu bar. I'm reliably informed that this
> would be extremely low risk, in that it would involve changing two lines
> of code.

The alternative would be to show both title and menu, but giving the 
menu priority. For habituation and quick aiming, it's important that the 
menu always starts in the same spot from the left (assuming LTR reading 
direction). To guarantee that, without using an offset from the left 
that will always be too small or too large, the title would have to be 
right-aligned to the right side of the window or panel. But 
clipped/faded-out on the right, when necessary.


--
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/