unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matt Richardson <m.richardson.1990@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I often hear suggestions like this; about where something should be
placed or how it should behave because it belongs to this or that
technical part of the system, but surely something should be placed
where it is most logical to place it in terms of user interaction, not
system semantics.

As Brandon said, moving the indicators to the bottom doesn't make sense
from an interaction point of view since it takes up more space (two
panels vs one).

Furthermore, placing them at the bottom would increase the distance the
mouse has to travel from the top-left corner. At the moment one of the
things I really like about Unity is that almost everything I use
regularly is in the top-left quarter of my screen. This is particularly
important for me, as I use a laptop touchpad. The indicators, being in
the top right, are a screen width away. If we put them in the bottom
right, they are a screen diagonal away.

If we were desperate to make the application/OS distinction (though as
I've said, I'm personally not in favour of semantics over ease of use)
we could put the indicators in the launcher, but then they take up space
in the launcher. This space could be reduced by having two columns of
indicators, but then some indicator menus would cover other indicators
and miss clicks become more annoying. We could also put the indicators
in a drawer, but that increases the number of clicks.

For me personally, the current location of indicators makes sense from
an interaction point of view, at the fairly minimal (IMHO) cost of
system semantics.

Matt

On 02/08/12 00:09, Pedro Bessa wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Mr. Yazel said he likes the option of changing the position
> of the top bar to the bottom of the screen.
>
>
> I said in a old, different bug report:
> "Windows are rectangles and the rectangles are a group,
> but you're making windows look like weird rectangles."
>
> Now, I noticed:
> in windows, sys tray is out of the window
> in unity, indicators are in the window
>
>
> Indicarors don't belong to the app/window.
> They belong to the os/distro.
>
>
> Please, move indicators to the bottom of the screen.
>
> Best regards,
> Pedro Bessa
>
> PS the quote is at https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/873541
>