Re: Feature proposal: combined system status menu

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Mon, 22.04.13 14:36, Allan Day (allanpday gmail com) wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> This is something that me, Jon and Jakub have been thinking about for
> some time, and is now at the stage where we can start to think about
> implementation. I'm proposing it as a feature for 3.10 [1].
>
> The main element of the design is to combine the sound, network,
> bluetooth, power and user menus into a single menu. This will enable
> us to resolve a number of UX issues we've encountered with the
> existing design (badness on touch, difficulties having the user name
> in the top bar, lots of complexity in some menus, like network,
> virtually none in others, like sound...). It will also give us greater
> flexibility, and will allow us to deal with some features - like
> airplane mode - in a more elegant and discoverable manner.

This all looks so ... crowded in the wireframes. So very very
crowded. That can't be good?

I understand that much of this is not supposed to be shown when not in
use, but this does open a lot of questions to me. i.e. you have to
figure out what "in use" means, i.e. for audio you probably have to
think about some latency after each action that audio is still
considered in use, and what about the usecase, where I am in a
presentation at a conference and somebody sends me a video, and i want
to see it, but want to turn off audio first, so that nobody notices that
i watch a video rather than watch the speaker? And regarding the
networking thing: if you want to show the networking bit only when
traffic is required, then you create a chicken and egg problem, where
the first network operation of an app will always fail, because you use
it as a trigger but can't offer the network immeidately yet... 

So, I see tons of problems coming up when you try to be "context
sensitive"... You need a lot of magic where you have to anticipate
actions of the user before he actually does them. Because the user might
want to change the volume *before* playing audio, and set up the network
*before* doing something, and so on and so on...

Also, if this menu shows when we are in airplane mode, and I presumably
can use it to get out of airplane mode: how do i actually get into
airplane mode if the option isn't shown then?

But first and foremost, this all looks so crowded. Looks more like some
feature-loaded KDE menu to me, rather then a minimalistic GNOME menu...

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.