unity-design team mailing list archive

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 1:37 PM, Ian Santopietro <isantop@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> At UDS-P, Mark announced his plans to have Ubuntu on Tablets, phones,
> and TVs by 14.04 LTS. You can start too early!
>
> http://i.imgur.com/56vDn.jpg
>
> I'd like feedback from the Ayatana community on the design. Is there
> anything that should be changed, or added? Possibly removed? Is there
> anything that isn't clear?

Beautiful!

I love the simpler styling here, and I really hope the desktop version
ends up with something similar. Feels very clean and elegant to me.

I have been pretty keen on dropping categorized indicator menus in
favour of generic notifications that organize themselves (ala.
Android, Gnome Shell, iOS, WebOS, etc). However, the way you've done
the notification dash gave me pause. I really like it, and it makes
sense. Just two details :)

First, I can't figure out the physical position of everything that
slides in to the screen. We have the dash appearing via a launcher
that you slide in from the left, and then the notification dash, which
is physically _above_ the dash, sliding in cleanly from the top of the
screen. Is the dash always there, on top of my workspace, but
invisible?
The issue in my head seems to revolve around how the dash appears,
rather than the notification dash.
Perhaps the dash could slide from the top and the notification dash
could be above that still (double the vertical movement?), and
clicking the title bar could jump straight to the notification dash.
That could feel a little busy, though.

My second problem, which isn't really a problem but an observation, is
a lot of this is not possible with the current indicator API, since
everything is a single menu item, and a lot of those are semantically
meaningless. Stuff like this would be a lot easier to implement if the
API was higher level, perhaps built around grouping information and
actions under headings. Where it's the thing that draws the menu (or
dash, or whatever) that figures out where to put those headings, how
to style them, and how much information to display from an instant
message.
To put it in a sentence, the current API feels a lot like HTML 2 in
terms of flexibility (though it means well) and we need something more
like XHTML.
Sorry, I'm digressing :)

I agree with starting the launcher with nothing in it, but do you
think it would make sense to pin apps to the launcher here? Or do you
think it should be strictly reserved for apps that are actually
running?

Dylan