unity-design team mailing list archive

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

Hi everybody! I've said many times that the AppLauncher position needs to be
configurable. In it's current implementation it only aligns to the left side
of the screen edge. This is probably because most western languages read
from left to right and it saves a lot of vertical space on widescreen
monitors.

Unity is designed to be a space saving environment but when a user uses a
different screen rotation (vertical instead of horizontal - many people work
like this when working with LO Calc or MS Excel) a ~ 60px wide vertical bar,
taking sometimes up to more than 1920px vertical space, steals valuable
horizontal space. If Unity really wants to be as versatile as Canonical are
aiming for it needs to be able to adapt. Take for example this demo with a
tablet running Ubuntu 11.04:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nHbRspykIQ

There you can see how much space it actually waste. If it were able to
automatically adapt depending on screen orientation or by manual
configuration this problem wouldn't exist. I don't know if it adapts to
right-to-left languages but it should be able to as well.

A whole other question is how Canonical believes their global AppMenu can be
easily used with touch displays, it seems like it would be next to
impossible to select what you want on such a tiny space. The Elementary
Project's philosophy regarding AppMenu's is far much more suited for a touch
screen environment:

http://elementaryos.org/docs/human-interface-guidelines/ui-toolkit-elements/appmenu

Cheers!