unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Loris Zinsou wrote on 14/05/12 21:50:>
> 
> ...
> 
> <http://design.canonical.com/2012/04/status-menus/> )
> 
> Why don't use the "blue color blinking" (as well as the "job 
> started" and "job complete" notifications) when a printing task is 
> ongoing instead of using some space in the launcher ?

I think a blinking icon would suggest, if you noticed it, that you
really needed to do something about it. With printing, you don't.

> To me, this would be consistent with the output notification logic 
> : for sound, you get a notification of what's going on ("next 
> song"..., as well as the blue coor blinking).

I haven't seen that myself, and the sound menu isn't supposed to go
blue at all. If it does for you, please report a bug.

Jonathan Meek wrote on 15/05/12 05:33:
> 
> I think this raises a more important issue: If an indicator remains
> missable (as I believe it was said messaging menu suffers from as
> well) does this mean we're doing indicators wrong or is it down to
> learned behaviors working against users?

Neither. The icon takes up about 0.03 percent of the area of a
1280*800 screen -- and even less of a larger screen. So I wouldn't
expect it to attract people's attention, no matter what its design is.

> In other words why aren't indicators indicating?

"Indicator" is engineering jargon used by the developers of those
menus. Any correspondence it has to the design purpose of the menus is
purely coincidental.

Thorsten Wilms wrote on 15/05/12 08:07:
> ...
> 
> In case of the messaging menu, I think it's not a bug but a 
> feature, that at least I have to actively look for it, to see if I 
> have new mails. That means it does not distract me, yet allows me 
> to get that little piece of information very quickly, when I look 
> for it.
> 
> The circumstances for the printing menu are different, starting 
> with the fact that it is not always present.

Exactly right.

> What happened to the plans to put some common functionality into 
> app-level indicators? Printing surely would have been a candidate?

I don't know what you mean by "app-level", sorry.

- -- 
mpt
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