unity-design team mailing list archive

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 10:15 AM, Swapnil Chitnis
<swapnilchitnis360@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Now many of us are Microsoft haters. One of the most significant note of the
> Windows UI is that you have to learn all over again for each new operating
> system. And that's what I love in Linux and Ubuntu in particular. Now here
> attached are the images of Ubuntu editions from 4.10 to 11.04. Just have a
> look how similar are each of them till 10.10. Now, on Thursday, if a novice
> Ubuntu user gets Natty, the he would just be flushed! How can I add those
> applets to the panel. How to add a new panel. In this way, the community
> should definitely come up with a "Unity Applet" for the Gnome panel to avoid
> any UI conflicts.
>

I can't help but sense a little flaw in your argument. A novice Ubuntu
user probably won't know about gnome-panel or care that Unity avoids
the applets thing, unless that person didn't want Unity in the first
place :)
We do have a lot of old screenshots, but that happens to everyone.

Don't get me wrong: I agree it would be neat to have this stuff
backported, especially if it's done with love. There is definitely a
vocal group of users who like Unity but want it to be more like the
panel, so maybe it would be useful to refer them to Gnome Panel that
behaves like Unity. The panel is in really good shape with Gnome 3, so
I can see it lasting on its own for some time. For a while the Classic
Desktop session was arranged a little like Unity, with the global menu
enabled and a single menu button instead of the menu bar applet. That
was eventually switched to the configuration we had before.

So, a lot of the bits are at hand; they just aren't totally obvious.
Some adventurous soul could probably make an applet that works like
the dash, perhaps building on something like Cardapio and using Unity
2d for reference. I, for one, would be interested to see that because
it might present lenses differently than Unity, and that kind of thing
would really help to test (and strengthen) the API.

Unity in general is a little big to stick in an applet, though. Which
pieces do you think would be useful in particular?

Oh, by the way, please try to avoid large attachments with mailing
list messages. The mailing list has to send that whole 1000 kB of
images to everyone who subscribes to this list, which is quite
wasteful (and fills up my mailbox). If you can, maybe link to a place
on the web that has the images — perhaps somewhere under ubuntu.com —
or stick them on some reliable web space.

--
Dylan