unity-design team mailing list archive

[Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> One fix in my opinion could be making the*window controls always
> visible* when a window is in maximized mode.

Yes, and there are arguments in favour of being explicit. Something that
hides itself is very risky, it's "mystery meat design".

We balance that against a desire to reduce the amount of chrome - nobs,
dials, and gadgets that get displayed. Being more implicit lets us
reduce the amount of visual clutter on the screen.

One rule we have, if we're going to make something disappear and then
appear only when you need it, is that its location has to be consistent
the whole time. We didn't talk about it at the time, but this was the
major driver for moving the window controls to the left: it is the place
where they will not collide with the indicators if we want to integrate
the window title bar and the menu bar, as we did.

> That way only the global menu and the window title would fade to each
> other. The unmaximized behavior could remain unchanged. Expanding the
> Launcher or implementing the sliding-desktop behavior would be almost
> identical in this case.

It's worth exploring. I'd be reluctant to ask any of the developers who
work for me to do that work, though, because I think there are some
problems, such as that trying to click on the close button could reveal
the launcher and have you click on the dash launcher instead. If there
is a patch that implements this, I'd be glad to test it, and if it feels
good, get it professionally tested for consideration.

Mark

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