unity-design team mailing list archive

[Petko <pditchev@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 02/28/2012 08:54 PM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> As you know, Mark, I have always maintained (most strongly in a
> meeting with you on May 13th last year) that the menu should not
> contain System Settings items at all.
>
> Presenting system settings, software updates, and session commands in
> a single interface element might make sense if it was branded as an
> "Ubuntu" menu, like they are presented in the Windows-branded Start
> menu and the Mac's Apple menu. (If that happened, though, the Dash
> home button would need different branding to avoid clashing. An
> alternative would be to embed the functions into the Dash home screen
> itself -- as I also suggested at that meeting -- though that would
> require the Ubuntu button to be visible more often than the launcher
> currently is.) But I don't think such a varied collection of functions
> could make sense with any other branding. Users can't be expected to
> predict that a particular menu contains software updates but not
> software search, attached scanners but not attached disks.
>
> The vacillation since about what the menu's title should be -- first
> power-cog, then power icon with cog overlay, and now power-cog again
> - -- is a symptom of the problem I described then. The icon is trying to
> communicate the incommunicable.
>
> Since you required System Settings items in the menu, though, John Lea
> chose Displays, Startup Applications, and Printing as his guess of
> which panels were most used, and I didn't feel like debating that.
> (Soon afterwards, Printing was subsumed by Printers in the "Attached
> Devices" section.)
I agree with everything in the mail , still I'd like to give an idea 
about those "most used" entries , wich is inspired by the spaghetti 
sauce example ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y ) . Let's 
have a small icon with a brush ,or something similar that means 
customization , in the upper or lower right corner of the menu that will 
open a simple checklist dialogue with a whitelist of items that may be 
added or excluded from the menu . If someone tries to feed me the "NO 
Options!" lecture again my reply is that I use 3 of the 11 entries of 
the menu , I should be , as a user ,able to make my system more usable. 
It discouraging that I should even make this disclaimer , but that's 
another topic . The idea (for those that havent seen the spaghetti 
video) is that there are no three most used panels , since there is no 
majority that has the same three most used panels , there's probably two 
,three or more big groups of people that have their own different sets 
of most used panels .

Petko