unity-design team mailing list archive

["Stefanos A." <stapostol@xxxxxxxxx>]

Some food for thought on restored window menus. The Firefox icon is
clickable and displays the menu. The menu is also displayed on the top panel
on mouse over (exactly like global menus function right now). Maximize the
window and the orb disappears.

Essentially, what this does is add a second way to access the menu within
the confines of a window. This has three advantages:
1. it allows you to open a menu of a background window in a single click
(currently you have to bring the background window to top and move the mouse
to the global menu)
2. it solves the focus-follows-mouse issues
3. it significantly improves touchscreen usability (the global menu is
unusable on touchscreens, due to its small vertical size)

The menu button should probably be the application icon (which we don't
display now) in a suitable exterior (e.g. a shiny orb or button). The mockup
here is purely for illustration purposes, so please don't bash my artwork -
an artist could make it look really awesome.

> If I understand you correctly, you would try showing the app name, but
> not the app window's title. This is not nice for Firefox as Firefox
> uses the window title to display the current webpage's title and this
> is important information.

This is Firefox's problem, not ours. The same information is available on
the address bar and the tab text - i.e. Firefox *triplicates* this
information. I don't think Unity should focus on the design issues of
3rd-party apps (because if it did, things like the global-menu wouldn't even
be an option).