unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ralph Green <sirable@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 5/18/11, Niklas Rosenqvist <niklas.s.rosenqvist@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Thanks for your thoughts Ralph! That statement you quoted was just after the
> 11.04 release and since then I've completely changed my mind about the
> global menu bar which you can see in more recent discussions. Though there
> have been some proposed solutions to the menu bar problem together with
> large monitors:

Niklas,
  What a relief.  I stayed away from the lists since I started using
Unity.  My impressions of it were so bad that I thought I needed to
force myself to give it more time for a fair chance.  After more than
2 months, I thought it was time.  I am glad to see that there is
active discussion and the topic has not been shut off.  I spent the
last hour going through lots of Ayatana email. I am now curious about
3 things.
 1. Did any decisions get made at UDS about the global menu for Oneiric?
 2. MPT seems to think the global menu is quicker, even on large
screens.   That is certainly not my experience.  My screen is not even
that large.  It is a 1600 by 1200 pixel 20 inch LCD. If I had a 30
inch screen, like I keep reading about, the problem would be much
worse. I measured the distance I have to go and find that it is
typically 4 to 8 times as far to get to the global menu.  Since the
time scales roughly as log to the base 2 of the distance, it takes 2.5
times as long.  It also requires me to pick up the mouse an extra time
or two because I ran out of mousable area on my desk, which makes it
more than 2.5.  It is much quicker to use a menu in the app.  The
question is how typical am I?
 3. Why do people keep referring to Fitt's law.  It does not apply to
2 dimensions, as best as I can tell.  Shouldn't the discussion be
about steering law?
Ralph