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unity launcher improvements

 

Hello

If you have many (different) devices (device is used substitutional for both: physical devices and partitions) mounted it can be very inconvenient to see a bunch of icons all looking the same and don't giving you information about the mounted device without holding the mouse cursor over the icon. Especially for keyboard navigation it takes much time to figure out which device the target device is. For mouse navigation the current behavior is not as inconvenient as for the keyboard method, but you still have to check every icon with the cursor after the wanted device, which takes more time to navigate than seeing the target device immediately. So in terms of usability the best option would be if you see the name of the device somewhere at the depending icon and display more information (for instance mount point etc.) about the device when the mouse is hovering over the icon.

If this is unwanted behavior in terms of design, then at least it would be great if the name of the device would automatically pop up (for example in the same place it pops up with the mouse cursor) in the keyboard navigation mode (for instance when the icon is selected (this idea could also be adopted for the normal apps displayed in the launcher!)).

But in terms of design I have to add, it is more aesthetic to see the icon and the depending name of a device instead of only showing an icon, because this doesn't look very good if you have mounted many external hard drives with many partitions on them and the launcher displays 10 icons all looking the same.

All these things are only suggestions about the unity launcher, maybe the design team could think about it, but especially for the keyboard navigation there has to be done something concerning reaching mounted media.

Another thing which is worth mentioning about the keyboard mode is the following: Imagine you have many icons in the launcher. For the first 9 you have the shortcut, but what about the rest? You have to press Alt-F1 and navigate icon for icon to reach a special icon. A nice solution would be if the icons in the launcher would be kind of grouped in groups of 9 giving every icon in a group a number from 1-9. By default the first group is selected and if you press super + (a number from 1 to 9) you launch the depending application in the first group. But if you want to launch a application of another group you press super + tab for instance and the next group of 9 icons under the first group is selected. Now you press the number of the application you want to launch. So this would be a more effective key navigation mode. The mounted devices could also be grouped.

The scroll speed in the mouse mode needs to be accelerated, because it takes ages if you have many icons. Maybe different users see this different so in this case the best option would be to make the scroll speed configurable in the Behavior tab in the Appearance Settings.

All these are only ideas, but I hope at least concerning the mounted devices there is something done. I would appreciate if someone would give a statement about these ideas, which were collected speaking with many different users.

To finish it would also be nice if there would be a keyboard short-cut for unity applications spread as well, for example Super +a.


Greetings