unity-design team mailing list archive

[Niklas Rosenqvist <niklas.s.rosenqvist@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ed Lin please review the comments and answers I've provided:

"You can't see what's running at a glance without hovering the
launcher. Why? Does it make sense for the user? Does it increase
 usability? I doubt so, it's just for aesthetic reasons."

There you just pointed to the exact problem I'm trying to address! If you
look at the first frame of the mockup you see the current setup, the
programs that are running have an illuminated background together with the
arrow on the left side. But that illuminated background is hard to see due
to the icon set.

"Icons are completely desaturated, this makes finding what you are
looking for more difficult. Only shape, not color is different, now
 imagine working on a glossy screen outdoors."

Usually, at least for me, people know the location of a launcher without
seeing it. E.g. I know that "home" is on top, then comes firefox,
thunderbird, liferea feed reader, playonlinux, banshee, etc. And the dream
situation would to have this as a configurable option to turn this feature
on or off, depending on if you think it's required with your icon set.

 "I think both can be solved with one solution: make the icons
 darker/more transparent but keep the color."

Together with the above setting for turning this feature on or off a simple
slider could be implemented to set how many percent the icons should be
grayed out.

 "However I'd reserve that for hidden applications and instead add a
 glow effect like GNOME 3 for running applications."

... That is exactly how it is implemented right now ... haven't you even
tried tweaking Unity with CCSM?

2011/5/3 Ed Lin <edlin280@xxxxxxxxx>

> On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 2:13 PM, Niklas Rosenqvist
> <niklas.s.rosenqvist@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Here I have the finished mockup of how this configurable feature could
> > work. For the future, what is the best way to share images with the
> > ayatana mailing list? Is it by attaching the image to the email or
> > upload it like I've done now?
> >
> > Here is the link:
> > http://i.imgur.com/bnIAE.png
> >
>
> Two things:
> You can't see what's running at a glance without hovering the
> launcher. Why? Does it make sense for the user? Does it increase
> usability? I doubt so, it's just for aesthetic reasons.
>
> Icons are completely desaturated, this makes finding what you are
> looking for more difficult. Only shape, not color is different, now
> imagine working on a glossy screen outdoors.
>
> I think both can be solved with one solution: make the icons
> darker/more transparent but keep the color.
> However I'd reserve that for hidden applications and instead add a
> glow effect like GNOME 3 for running applications. Actually, I'm not
> convinced the visibility of running apps needs to be improved at all.
>
> The whole point of a dock is to blur the line between starting apps
> and switching to apps (abstract it away from the user). If you
> disagree with this decision the dock isn't for you (install tint2 or
> something).
> Or remove all icons from the launcher and exclusively use the dash for
> launching.
>