unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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GonzO wrote on 08/06/11 21:59:
>
> On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 4:46 PM, Ed Lin <edlin280@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>...
>> Dock: I haven't seen an HD version but it looks like even the subtle
>> hints of running apps are gone, together with auto save their desktop
>> behaves more closely to iOS.

Yes, the lights are still there but off by default.
<http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/02/2011-02-28lionp-11p-1-1298942446.jpg>

> -- BEGIN RANT --
>
> This is my single biggest complaint against all of the new-wave GUI
> paradigms out there, hands down.
>
> Some information is important and should be on the screen at all times.
>
> Sometimes this is simply because of convenience - like knowing what
> time it is just by looking at the screen.
>
> Sometimes this is to avoid annoyance.  It is nice to have a dock
> there, telling me which programs are open, and of the ones that are,
> how many windows they have open.  Again, all I need to do is *look at
> the screen* to get this information - not go to some other part of the
> OS, separate from the desktop, and only accessible if i hit the magic
> keyboard combination or accidentally touch a "hot" corner.

What you may not have realized is that for most applications, the
addition of (1) Auto Save and (2) Resume removes the final reasons that
people cared about knowing whether the application was running at all. A
lot of plumbing work went into making that UI simplification possible.

When an application implements both Auto Save and Resume, and doesn't
have stuff to do in the background, the OS can even pause or quit the
application automatically when it needs the CPU or memory respectively.
Again, you don't need to care.

As for how many windows are open, well, Unity's launcher doesn't tell
you that precisely anyway. :-)

> Most importantly, though, some bits of information are useless
> *unless* they are always visible.  I won't know if my inbox is
> populated unless I can see the envelope icon.  I won't know that
> something is very wrong, and taking up 100% of my CPU, if I have to
> move something or go to another screen to see my CPU indicator.  The
> whole point of these sorts of indicators is specifically TO get in the
> way of whatever I'm doing, because there are some instances where I
> have deemed it *important to interrupt me*.

Agreed.

>...
>> if they only weren't hidden and were more flexible to allow
>> _something_ like the ribbon as well.
>
> The day Linux starts using a Ribbon is the day I stop using Linux.
> That thing is a horror.  It manages to take up 150px and does
> essentially the same job of something that only took up 24 previously.
>...

I'm not a fan of the Ribbon either, but to be fair to Microsoft, in
Office it takes up less space overall than the previous menu bar and
toolbars combined.
<http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/02/17/534099.aspx>

Unfortunately, the Ribbon was then reused in applications such as Paint
where it had the opposite effect. That's symptomatic of the Ribbon's
basic problem: it broke consistency with other applications, and in
trying to regain consistency, those other applications got worse.

- -- 
mpt
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