unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ed Lin <edlin280@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 11:13 PM, Niklas Rosenqvist
<niklas.s.rosenqvist@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 2011/5/24 Ed Lin
>>
>> A very rough sketch based on your image and parts scraped from google
>> images...
>> http://i.imgur.com/WMLYk.png
>
> I understand your idea but to me it feels like a last resort "make it just
> work" solution.
>
> 1. It takes up a really big part of the launcher. The mockup is based on a
> screen with 1050 px height so on smaller screens it could take up a majority
> of the launcher.

The communication icon is optional, the workspace and BFB could be
half the size. The clock could be changed to more closely resemble
your mockup. The important aspect of it really is having no icons that
aren't at the screen edge.

> 2. None of the items are separated from other launcher items visually (which
> I understand is the idea with it). This would probably be confusing for new
> users since they will act differently than other launchers and IMHO visually
> look bad.

This was only a sketch as I said. The idea is to make one button for
several indicator icons, the size and design of that button is a
different matter.

> The "icons" will be dynamic, the icons within icons (e.g. wifi,
> sound, battery) will be really hard to make look like they're there because
> a thought through design choice.

I'm not sure I follow.

> 3. It will completely rule out standard third party applications.

That's kind of by design, note what GNOME3 (and Win7 to some extent) is doing.

> 4. If a regular launcher have a black icon, it will be totally confusing.
> Not to be rude but there must be a better way to solve this than with this
> design. It's not bad to make different elements of the OS look different,
> often it's a plus.

Sure, see above.


On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 11:15 PM, Niklas Rosenqvist
<niklas.s.rosenqvist@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> As an addition to the reply to Ed Lin:
>
> Imagine when the launcher gets overflowed with launcher so that it stacks
> them at the top and bottom, how would this work together with your design?
> 2011/5/24 Niklas Rosenqvist <niklas.s.rosenqvist@xxxxxxxxx>

They'd stack above those four.

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 12:07 AM, Ian Santopietro <isantop@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The point I'm trying to make is that the current panel isn't broken, and
> moving things like that is just change for the sake of change. When you're
> trying to build a set and solid identity, that;s not a good thing.
>
Not for the sake of change, that was Unity 1.0 :(

> What really makes the bottom edge so ill-suited to placing interface
> elements? Is it really something that sets it apart from the top edge, or
> app developers wish not to place UI elements there?

Ask them, I can't think of any application except image and video
players that puts important interface elements to the bottom of their
windows. I guess there are several reasons. We start reading in the
top left, controls should be closer to each other to be both
discoverable and fast to access, viewing angle on laptops means
content in the upper half is better visible, look and feel of vertical
scrolling is more appealing, it logically separates content from
interface more cleanly.

> Even if we did open up the top edge as opposed to the bottom edge, where is
> the guarantee that app developers would take advantage of that and actually
> use it?

They already are...

> Web browsers, for example, seem to be following a tabs on top
> approach to design. This issue with this design is that unless the user has
> focus issues, switching tabs should not be the most important controls.

Wow, a bold statement. I'm not a Google fanboy but a lot of usability
testing went into Chrome, a lot more than into Unity...

>  And
> what exactly happens to the title bar if we put the panel on the bottom?
> Does it move to the bottom? That's quite a large change for very little
> additional functionality. Alternatively, we can leave the title bar on top,
> but then that defeats the point behind moving the panel to the bottom in the
> first place.

Maximized windows need no titlebar across the full screen edge. See
Photoshop, Office, Firefox, Chrome (on Windows).

> Even if we remove the panel, that last point holds true. We aren't opening
> up the top screen edge, only putting something else there. We may as well
> leave the panel there, as in it's current form it takes no additional space,
> and *does* provide functionality, unlike a title bar only or a tab bar.

It doesn't for me, the only thing I use is clock. The rest is
irrelevant for my me most of the time. Wlan and battery? Not on a
desktop. Email and IM? My browser is all I need. Global menu? I use
keyboard shortcuts.
But thanks for making my tabs harder to access.

> I haven't seen honeycomb yet. Some guy was hogging the Xoom at the Sprint
> store I visited on Sunday.
It has a bar at the bottom, same as KDE and Windows, I don't see a
trend here at any rate, or "oddity". Besides you can't really bring
touch interfaces into the discussion here. Unity *is* designed for
mouse on keyboard.