unity-design team mailing list archive

[Chris Coulson <chrisccoulson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2011-03-15 at 17:34 +0000, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
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> After several weeks of trying, last week I finally succeeded in
> installing Natty to test Unity.
> 
> 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. I reported a bug about this, but John
> Lea marked it as Invalid on the grounds that "this change request
> contradicts the design". He requested that I discuss it here.
> 
> 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>
> 
> I see four major problems with hiding the menus and covering them with
> an application or window title.
> 
> 1.  Most importantly, it makes the menus much harder to use.
> 
>     The "The Unity Menu" document says that "The top level of the menu
>     rarely shows significant information (it is not an indicator) - it
>     consists essentially of category headings, like 'File' and 'Edit'
>     and 'View'. None of those add any relevant information to the task
>     at hand, or wider awareness."
> 
>     Whoever wrote that is mistaken. Every time the task at hand involves
>     using a menu, it is necessary first to be aware of, and then to move
>     the pointer to, the desired menu. That is much harder to do if the
>     menu is invisible until just after you finish needing to know where
>     it is. Whether the menus collectively are "an indicator" is
>     irrelevant: the first item in the rationale, for what determines
>     whether something appears in the menu bar, has always been "It's
>     not whether it's a status indicator".
> <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MenuBar?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=whether-something-appears.jpg>
> 
> 2.  It makes some functions effectively invisible.
> 
>     For example, last month Jack Wallen wrote for TechRepublic
>     <http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/x/2291>: "One of the
>     most handy menu entries in GNOME (for me at least) is the Connect
>     to Server entry in the Places menu. This allows the user to connect
>     to nearly any type of server quickly and easily. The user can even
>     connect to a Windows Share from here. In Unity - you won’t find
>     that. In fact, you will be hard pressed to find any means to
>     connect to a server in Ubuntu Unity."
> 
>     At the time, I didn't understand how he could have had that problem.
>     Now I do. The "Connect to Server" item, which is in the "Places"
>     menu on the Ubuntu 10.10 desktop, is in the "File" menu on the
>     Natty desktop. But the desktop appears, incorrectly, to have no
>     menus at all.
> 
>     The "The Unity Menu" document says "Many modern applications are
>     being designed without substantial menus". The problem with that
>     approach was explained in my initial post introducing the menu bar:
>     it results in gratuitous inconsistency between applications.
>     <http://design.canonical.com/2010/05/menu-bar/#history> But that is
>     beside the point. Hiding menus for windows that *do* rely on them
>     does nobody any good.
> 
> 3.  The application or window title becomes ugly when the menus appear.
> 
>     For example, when using Nautilus's menus, the menu bar reads
>         File Man File Edit View Go Bookmarks Help.
> 
>     Similarly when using Terminal's menus, the menu bar reads
>         Termina File Edit View Search Terminal Help.
> 
>     And when using Calculator's menus, the menu bar gets a stutter:
>         Calculat Calculator Mode Help.
> 
> 4.  The application or window title and the title bar are redundant, and
>     sometimes inconsistent too.
> 
>     For example, when that Calculator window is open, its title bar says
>     "Calculator", and the menu bar pointlessly repeats "Calculator".
>     When a Banshee window is open, its title bar says "Banshee Media
>     Player", and the menu bar repeats "Banshee Media Player". When a
>     PolicyKit authentication alert is open, its title bar says
>     "Authenticate", and the menu bar repeats "Authenticate".
> 
>     Other windows are inconsistent. For example, Firefox's title bar
>     says "Mozilla Firefox", but the menu bar disagrees, saying
>     "Firefox Web Browser". Shotwell's title bar says "Shotwell", but
>     the menu bar says "Shotwell Photo Manager". Most amusingly, if you
>     open a presentation in LibreOffice and then open an accompanying
>     spreadsheet, the title bar says "LibreOffice Calc" while the menu
>     bar says "LibreOffice Impress".
> 
> There are two paragraphs in the "The Unity Menu" document that I agree
> with. One says: "The top edge of the screen has some advantages for fine
> mouse pointer targeting." But that is true only when you know where the
> target area is before you begin. The other says: "Screen space is
> extremely valuable, and we prefer to use pixels for content that is
> unique to the focused task, or wider awareness, than for chrome." Menus
> are unique to the focused task. Application names are not.
> 
> 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.
> 
> - -- 
> mpt
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Hi,

What would happen for maximized windows? I fully agree that displaying
the window title in the panel for non-maximized windows makes no sense,
but are you suggesting that we should lose the window title entirely for
maximized windows too?

For the "Connect to Server" example you gave too - this is pretty bad
even if you *do* know where the menu is, because you need to minimize
windows and/or click on an empty area on the desktop in order to even
get the menu to show (and I don't think that's particularly discoverable
IMO). Is there not a better way to provide such functionality (eg, a
button in the Files & Folders dash)?

Regards
Chris

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