unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry about that. Gmail fools me sometimes. :)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: 27 July 2011 17:04
Subject: Re: [Ayatana] Place "Shut Down" as the last entry in the
Sessions-Menu for Oneiric and beyond
To: Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>


On 27 July 2011 13:39, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> We have no evidence that a non-trivial proportion of people notice
> differently colored icons in the menu bar.

You might say that's an assumption, based on personal experience and
observation. Sure, it's not a scientific test, and I only have tested
it on 10-20 people. But I noticed it the first time it changed color
and I was surprised by how effective that really is.

> I don't see how they'd be more likely to search for them in the menu bar.

* the indicators are visible. The launcher is not.
* bluetooth is displayed as an indicator, not as a launcher.
* you often have many usb devices connected.
* devices need a description. Menus as suitable for that. Launchers aren't.

> Personally, I would find more inviting a launcher that I could put
> anything into -- applications, bookmarks, documents, folders, contacts,
> whatever. I can do that with the Mac OS X Dock and (mostly) with the
> Windows 7 taskbar.

Interesting. Wouldn't that make the launcher notifications (usb, etc)
even more difficult to find? I thought I would want to keep all of my
most used applications on the launcher and that I would temporarily
move icons up and down according to what I'm doing so that I could
rearrange keyboard shortcuts. Turns out I do, but in a much smaller
degree than I had expected. The first six launchers are completely
static. The next four is more "dynamic", used for documents I'm
working on right now, but don't need to launch using keyboard
shortcuts. That works well for me, because then I launch and switch to
my most used applications using only the left hand, and the shortcuts
get very familiar. The work I'm doing right now changes, so I have to
look up the shortcut number in any case, meaning that it doesn't
bother me that I have to use two hands. In that regard, it would be
nice if we could make a certain window type ungroupable, so that you
could easily switch between open writer documents, for instance.

But then the usability rapidly declines. I might have 13 tiles, but
not more. Scrolling up and down a thin strip of tiles just isn't
effective. I feel compelled to use the mouse, and that's a bad thing,
but in any case, it just doesn't provide a good overview. So I end up
launching applications from the dash and then closing them rather than
keeping them around in the launcher. So my impression is that the
launcher should be used for the absolute most common operations, and
then the dash could display an overview of what's going on. That is to
say, a list of running applications and open documents, possibly
ordered by application frequency and then document use frequency. It
might possibly be useful to display a few documents that aren't open
too, but that are used frequently. A benefit of that, is that you'd
have a better overview, and access to a much larger set of keyboard
shortcuts than just numbers.

I can't imagine that I would ever want to use the launcher for files,
links and folders. I also think that I'd rather unmount USB devices
from nautilus than from the launcher. The preference of course, would
be to have an indicator for them, since I think that's a very obvious
place for things like that.


Thanks.

Jo-Erlend