unity-design team mailing list archive

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

> 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.
>
> […]
>
> 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

Today I have been working on my fix for bug #716177:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/716177
Right now, the panel acts like the titlebar for the current maximized
window, but only if it's in focus. That leaves a big hole where a
maximized window is visible and it isn't in focus, but the top panel
still looks like it should correspond to that window. (The tldr
version: try using GIMP, maximized, without frowning). My patch makes
the top panel's draggable area relate to the front-most maximized
window regardless of who is in focus.

Anyway, I bumped into a design question that relates to this! The
draggable titlebar proxy works, and I had the code lined up to fix the
button proxy, but fixing that would totally break the application
title for an unmaximized window. So, the inconsistency mpt describes
hits us in another place: when somebody maximizes a window, its title
bar disappears and is replaced by a pretend title bar that doesn't
look or feel like an ordinary title bar. We do fairly well making it
work, and my patch brings that a little closer, _except for the
buttons_ :)

Dylan