unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 22. feb. 2012 15:39, Adrian Maier wrote:
> Sorry for ranting , but killing productivity for visual cuteness is
> not progress ...
> It should be possible to have a classical menu with applications
> categories  (maybe on right-click on the desktop).

I would agree that showing the filters by default would make things 
easier for users when exploring the system in the first hours of use. I 
completely disagree that Gnome Panel menubar (which people unfortunately 
refer to as Gnome 2) is more productive. Quite the contrary.

My ten most used applications are on the launcher. So it will never take 
more than one second to launch any of them. The six second-most used 
applications are also extremely fast and easy to find. You just tap 
super, and they're there. If I click "See more results", that list is 
expanded to show my 13 second-most used applications. This might 
actually be because I don't use more than 23 applications that frequently.

If I need to launch an application that is not among my 30 most used 
applications, then I search. But even if I wanted to navigate by mouse, 
that wouldn't require more than 20-30 seconds and since this is 
necessarily something I don't do often, I don't see it as a problem.

I test everything. I've been trying out both Xfce, LXDE and Gnome Panel. 
Those menus are far less productive if you already know what software 
you have installed. You still need to do manual search of the menus, and 
no matter how hard I try, I can never match the speed of access that I 
get with the dash.

> My personal conclusion :   the current Unity is just as disappointing
> as last year.

If your personal expectation was that the dash should be a clone of the 
existing Gnome Panel menubar, then it's easy to understand that 
disappointment. It's a different product. But to me, it doesn't really 
sound like you've tested this with an open mind. It sounds as if you 
were expecting a directory interface. It isn't.
> But there is still zero configurability   (in settings ->  appearance
> the user can only change the  wallpaper  and  autohide the launcher .
>    Quite hilarious in a sad way  )  .

There's zero configurability, you claim, and then you start to enumerate 
the config options. :)
> My main showstopper  :  no classic applications menu.

Sounds to me as if you want to use the classic desktop instead then. 
What's wrong with that? If you have a habit, it might be more 
comfortable for you to keep doing things the way you're doing it instead 
of switching to another workflow. If you want to participate, however, 
it would be nice if you tried to share ideas and not just list things 
you don't like.

An obvious solution to your problem, for instance, is to simply display 
the filters by default.


Jo-Erlend Schinstad