unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jamu Kakar <jkakar@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I upgraded to Unity a couple days ago and I'm really enjoying it,
great work everyone!  One minor niggle I've come across is that I'm
finding launcher alerts are a bit too subtle.  One of the behaviours
from classic GNOME that I like very much is that, in X-Chat GNOME in
particular, the window in the task list would throb when my nick was
mentioned.  It was nice because I could see that something needed my
attention, but if I didn't want to change focus I could easily ignore
it.

In Unity several things happen when a window becomes alerted:

- The X-Chat GNOME icon in the launcher wobbles for a short period of
  time.

- A 1px border, very similar to the colour of the icon tile appears.

- The BFB turns blue.

While this is useful, I find I have to focus a bit more than I'd like
to see which window is alerted.  The blue BFB button isn't enough for
me to know what window requires my attention, because many kinds of
alerts cause it to change state, and scanning the list of icons in the
launcher is hard because the alert border is small.  I could see the
throbbing window in the task list in classic GNOME at a glance,
without changing my focus from my task.

I'm not sure what the best way to address this issue in Unity is, but
some ideas come to mind:

- Make the icon throb when the related window is alerted.

- Make it wobble regularly.  Continuous wobbling would be distracting,
  but a quick wobble every 10s might be good.

Have others experienced this kind of issue?  Is it just something my
eyes will adapt to given some more time?

Thanks,
J.