unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 13/02/12 18:35, Brandon Watkins wrote:
> I'd rather see autohide replaced with dodge windows. I don't see the 
> logic in keeping autohide, but removing dodge windows, which to me has 
> superior functionality. Why would I want my dock hidden when there is 
> no windows covering it? When I can see my dock on a blank desktop it 
> is quicker for me to find what I want, and it only hides when it needs 
> to. I understand not wanting to bloat it with options, but I think 
> dodge should stay. To me autohide is essentially a "dumber" autohide.

Yes, that's true. To you. To someone who understands both sides of this, 
and therefor is not surprised by the behaviour, autohide is a dumber 
dodge (is what I think you meant to say).

It's great to be clever enough to understand all of that. But our 
audience just finds it confusing. We tested it, that's the result of the 
test.

So the question then becomes, is autohide *so much more productive* for 
the insiders that it justifies keeping it around confusing the 
outsiders? And the answer is quite clearly no. If revealing the hidden 
launcher is too hard, then autohide itself would be a non-starter. So 
let's concentrate our efforts on making the experience of autohide 
really great.

And that's what we've been doing. The latest builds have:

 * introduced a shadow hint that clues you in to the imminent reveal, 
helping users avoid false positive reveals
 * introduced heuristics to judge intent of the user, to tell the 
difference between inadvertent edge touches and deliberate pushes
 * addressed some of the interactions between multi-monitor setups and 
edge-launcher setups.

In other words, instead of maintaining multiple, shallow codepaths, we 
are able to maintain fewer, *deeper* codepaths. Perceived quality 
doesn't come from the number of options. It comes from the level of 
refinement of the options presented. And quality is our goal.

I hope you understand the rationale, and are excited about helping with 
the interesting and challenging goal of making our autohide the best 
autohide on the planet :). So far, we've had lots of reports from people 
saying things like "fantastic, I don't get unexpected reveals of the 
launcher any more", but I bet we can still do better. Let's use the 
combined smarts of our community designers and developers to make that 
reveal slick, light, fast, accurate and magical. That's much harder than 
just keeping dodge around, and much more worthwhile for *everybody*.

Mark