Re: [Ayatana] Serious issues

2011-11-03 Thread Matt Richardson 
Another potential would be to prevent windows from occupying the 
left-most 5px-10px of the screen. The Firefox back button is a stickler 
for this launcher behaviour, but try resizing it so that it is almost 
maximised, except leave a small space on the left hand side. This really 
helps to prevent the launcher popping out when not wanted IMO.


Matt

On 03/11/11 05:49, James Jenner wrote:
On 3 November 2011 14:06, Elias K Gardner > wrote:


When you have to interact close to the left edge of a window the
launcher can be accidentally activated blocking interaction on
that part of the open window.

The launcher can be made not to popout when the cursor hits the
screen side by installing CompizConfig Settings Manager and
changing the Unity plugin's reveal mode on the behavior tab to "none".

I think this is one setting that should be somewhere in the system
settings out of the box. It is maddening to have to move your
cursor out to close the launcher then carefully back.

Another alternative would be to have a button that when pressed
keeps/closes the launcher (just thinking out loud her not sure its
a good idea, seams to duplicate the super key dash functionality a
little).


An alternative would be to have a visual interactive control on the 
launcher that changes it's state of popout and to not popout. A pin is 
the obvious analogy though in reality some form of marker (eg. a small 
circle or an arrow or similar) would do the trick, as in to be 
consistent with the styling of Unity. Obviously a keyboard shortcut 
would apply as well.


With such an option when the launcher is hidden, the control to stop 
it from popping out would need to be visible, so some thought would be 
needed as to where this control sits, how it appears and how a user 
interacts with it (both via keyboard and the mouse).


I personally think such an option (to stop it popping out 
automatically) isn't such a bad idea.Maybe instead of a "don't popout" 
control, it could be a "hide launcher" control.


Just some thoughts. For me personally it hasn't been a problem and I 
have no need for such functionality, but then I have a very large 
screen and very rarely work full screen within an application. However 
I can see how this could be required for certain types of environments 
and work patterns.


Cheers,
James.


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Re: [Ayatana] Serious issues

2011-11-03 Thread Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen 

On 11/03/2011 01:50 AM, Jo-Erlend Schinstad wrote:
We have really serious issues with Unity. For instance, look at the 
attached screenshot.


Can you please include a descriptive subject line and an actual 
explanation of the perceived problem in your email another time?


Consider that you are writing an email to 755 people and they might not 
not all be able to be read your mind :-)


Cheers,
Mikkel

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Re: [Ayatana] Serious issues

2011-11-03 Thread Stefanos A. 
Two other potential solutions:

1. A visual proximity indicator to the hidden launcher, for instance as a
very soft glow that becomes more visible as the mouse moves towards the
left side (similar to KDE 4.x when its taskbar is set to autohide).

- or -

2. Make the left-most column a clickable region and show the launcher only
on mouse click or on high-momentum mouse movements. This way, the launcher
will only appear after a deliberate action (click or high-momentum hit) and
will not get in the way when working in the left region of the screen.
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Re: [Ayatana] Easy to use menus for touch and non touch devices

2011-11-03 Thread Matthew Paul Thomas 
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Matt Richardson wrote on 03/11/11 09:01:
> 
> It strikes me that the idea behind hiding the menus has been that 
> for people with touch devices these menus are not useful and future
> applications should avoid the use of menus where possible.


That is the idea, but it is a misunderstanding. Touch applications
avoid menus partly through gestures, which often aren't available on a
PC, and mostly though having many fewer features than they would on a
PC. (For example, iTunes, Pages, and Keynote on iOS all have fewer
features than the same apps on Mac OS X.)

> However, this requires developers to rewrite their programs with 
> touch friendly interfaces and does not, in the intervening time, 
> offer a solution.


True. Imagine if you were at Adobe, for example, porting Photoshop to
Ubuntu. Avoiding menus obviously wouldn't be an option: it has far too
many features for that, and the interface needs to be mostly
consistent across platforms anyway. But Ubuntu's native menus wouldn't
be nearly visible enough for all those features. Possibly the least
bad choice would be to use a non-native menu bar.

> As an all round solution I suggest replacing the context menu with 
> a gnome pie menu which would contain the context menu items in the 
> right half, and the top menus as items in the left half. For 
> example: Right clicking a blank space in Nautilus would bring up a 
> pie in which 'Create New Folder', 'Create New Document' etc
> through to 'Properties', would make up the right half of the pie
> and 'File', 'Edit', 'View' etc through to 'Help' would make up the
> left half of the pie.
> 
> ...


Pie menus wouldn't work there, because they'd have many text items.


Pie menus do work when their items are few or icon-only.


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Re: [Ayatana] Easy to use menus for touch and non touch devices

2011-11-03 Thread Thorsten Wilms 

On 11/03/2011 02:01 PM, Matt Richardson wrote:

It strikes me that the idea behind hiding the menus has been that for
people with touch devices these menus are not useful and future
applications should avoid the use of menus where possible.


What makes you think that would be the idea?

The panel menus in the top right suggests that menus as such are deemed 
OK. Add the Launcher hiding behavior and one must conclude that Unity as 
presented in 11.10 is not at all touch-friendly.




As an all round solution I suggest replacing the context menu with a
gnome pie menu which would contain the context menu items in the right
half, and the top menus as items in the left half.
For example:
Right clicking a blank space in Nautilus would bring up a pie in which
'Create New Folder', 'Create New Document' etc through to 'Properties',
would make up the right half of the pie and 'File', 'Edit', 'View' etc
through to 'Help' would make up the left half of the pie.


Pie menus must be designed to get the right number of items in the right 
places. Application menus vary wildly in the number and selection of 
top-level items.


Increasing the number of items exposed at once will increase the average 
time it takes to select a single item.



Though in general, I would love to see proper marking menus in Free 
Software.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtH9GdFSQaw
http://www.billbuxton.com/MMUserLearn.html
http://www.billbuxton.com/MMExpert.html

Autodesk did some work on multi-touch marking menus:
http://www.autodeskresearch.com/publications/multitouchmm


--
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/

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Re: [Ayatana] Easy to use menus for touch and non touch devices

2011-11-03 Thread frederik.nn...@gmail.com 
On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 16:01, Thorsten Wilms  wrote:

> On 11/03/2011 02:01 PM, Matt Richardson wrote:
>
>> It strikes me that the idea behind hiding the menus has been that for
>> people with touch devices these menus are not useful and future
>> applications should avoid the use of menus where possible.
>>
>
> What makes you think that would be the idea?
>
> The panel menus in the top right suggests that menus as such are deemed
> OK. Add the Launcher hiding behavior and one must conclude that Unity as
> presented in 11.10 is not at all touch-friendly.
>
>
>
>  As an all round solution I suggest replacing the context menu with a
>> gnome pie menu which would contain the context menu items in the right
>> half, and the top menus as items in the left half.
>> For example:
>> Right clicking a blank space in Nautilus would bring up a pie in which
>> 'Create New Folder', 'Create New Document' etc through to 'Properties',
>> would make up the right half of the pie and 'File', 'Edit', 'View' etc
>> through to 'Help' would make up the left half of the pie.
>>
>
> Pie menus must be designed to get the right number of items in the right
> places. Application menus vary wildly in the number and selection of
> top-level items.
>
> Increasing the number of items exposed at once will increase the average
> time it takes to select a single item.
>
>
> Though in general, I would love to see proper marking menus in Free
> Software.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?**v=dtH9GdFSQaw
> http://www.billbuxton.com/**MMUserLearn.html
> http://www.billbuxton.com/**MMExpert.html
>
> Autodesk did some work on multi-touch marking menus:
> http://www.autodeskresearch.**com/publications/multitouchmm


now that's top material right there!
i had some designs with something i called "finger pies", but they never
reached maturity, as i developed the concept on paper only and i didn't
have time to complete it. Needless to say, it is important to adapt the
computer's interface to natural human gestures and anatomy.

we have 5 fingers, so it's obvious that a pie menu with a max of 5 entries
would be a place to start.
also do i not see, why it has to be a full circle, the fingers of the hand
also don't shape a circle, which makes the designated model more
half-circle like, an arc. And now we're quite close to what the above links
about marking menus offer.. visually at least.

i'm excited about what else this thread will produce :D

thanks Matt, great inspiration!
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