unity-design team mailing list archive

[Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/03/2011 02:01 PM, Matt Richardson wrote:
> It strikes me that the idea behind hiding the menus has been that for
> people with touch devices these menus are not useful and future
> applications should avoid the use of menus where possible.

What makes you think that would be the idea?

The panel menus in the top right suggests that menus as such are deemed 
OK. Add the Launcher hiding behavior and one must conclude that Unity as 
presented in 11.10 is not at all touch-friendly.


> As an all round solution I suggest replacing the context menu with a
> gnome pie menu which would contain the context menu items in the right
> half, and the top menus as items in the left half.
> For example:
> Right clicking a blank space in Nautilus would bring up a pie in which
> 'Create New Folder', 'Create New Document' etc through to 'Properties',
> would make up the right half of the pie and 'File', 'Edit', 'View' etc
> through to 'Help' would make up the left half of the pie.

Pie menus must be designed to get the right number of items in the right 
places. Application menus vary wildly in the number and selection of 
top-level items.

Increasing the number of items exposed at once will increase the average 
time it takes to select a single item.


Though in general, I would love to see proper marking menus in Free 
Software.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtH9GdFSQaw
http://www.billbuxton.com/MMUserLearn.html
http://www.billbuxton.com/MMExpert.html

Autodesk did some work on multi-touch marking menus:
http://www.autodeskresearch.com/publications/multitouchmm


--
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/