unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mitja Pagon <mitja.pagon@xxxxxxxxxx>]

To understand just how counterproductive your idea is, try and imagine what it would be like to work with such menu in applications like GIMP or Inkscape, where one has to access menus often (extra click for each menu access), it might seem OK at first, but try doing that for hours, not only would it cause additional physical strain, it would be very annoying after a short while. 

What you did is actually very common mistake, and one most people do (as we are poor thinkers in general), is go straight to trying to solve the problem, without actually defining what the problem is. If you do not establish what the actual problem is, you cannot find a solution and once you find a possible solution you need to do what is called a potential problem/benefit analysis to figure out if your solution is any good (if it does not do more harm than good in the long run). It is only after you do that, you can find a effective solutuion to your problem (and this applies to all matters in life, not just UI/UX design). 

But as I said, do not worry, as Canonical pretty much did the same thing, and that's why we are having this debate. 

Cheers, 
Mitja 

----- "Renze van der kamp" <renzevanderkamp@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
> 
> 
Hi list, 
> 
> First of all I don't have Unity installed currently and I'm not a native English speaker but I'd like to share an idea I've had. I'd like to discus combining the mockup I've quoted and the menu button as seen in the youtube video (and Firefox 4 on Win7). If we make the windowtitle of the window a button on all floating windows we achieve the goal of decluttering the desktop and it doesn't get into the mess of trying to put a whole menubar inside a tiny titlebar for small windows and it'll leave room for dragging the window. It doesn't require a click on the window to make it focused and then going back to the top panel to select an option (something I find myself doing all the time on osx). This means that it only requires an extra click on already focused windows. 
> 
> There is another advantage if multiple windows are maximized. I don't need to know which window is maximized and focused, I should recognize it from the content displayed in the window itself covering my whole screen. Therefore we could display the menubuttons of all maximized windows next to each other on the panel exposing the menu of the hidden maximized window and at the same time provide information on which windows are lurking beneath (probably going from left to right in order of being maximized (or opened), like tabs). These menu's cannot be used for window switching, but that's what the launcher is for anyway. I think the behavior of the top panel will be easier to understand as it now only merges the "titlebar with menu inside" exactly like it's seen on the window. I hope you'll understand my idea, but for a visual thinker I've included a mockup http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1286396/Ubuntu/menubuttons.png . 

> 
Thanks in advance for considering it. 

> Renze van der Kamp 
> 
> On 04/15/2011 05:45 PM, Christian Mackintosh wrote: 

(...) As far as I'm concerned the only sensible solution is this: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/02/unity-mockup-menu-integrated-in-window.html , which I will keep banging on about because it's so brilliant. (...) 
> 

Christian Mackintosh 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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