3 ms·

Great move, the single menu bar thing is just terrible design. It just moves common application actions further away from their context in order to give more ro

• nfoz 13y ago
  One of the nice thing about menus being at the top of the screen is an adherence to Fitt's law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitt%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitt%27s_law > Edges and corners of the computer monitor (...) are particularly easy to acquire with a mouse, touchpad or trackball. Because the pointer remains at the screen edge regardless of how much further the mouse is moved, they can be considered as having infinite width. This doesn't apply to touchscreens, though. But there's an argument to be made for the spatial-locality as well, as you say. I think it's an interesting trade-off / difference of design philosophy.
  • RyanZAG 13y ago
    This tradeoff is best left to the user's specific task and is handled in a very intuitive and usable fashion: maximizable windows.
    • nzp 13y ago
      No, it's actually best handled the way they are about to handle it: let the user choose the alternative themselves.
    • pekk 13y ago
      This has its own problems, which are part of why tiling WMs are a thing
  • Avshalom 13y ago
    Well there's two things: -A UI can't/can't-not adhere to Fitt's Law; Fitt's law tells you where to put things to make them easy to hit* it says nothing about what you should put there. -The entire edge is infinite but if your mouse has any horizontal velocity (which is extremely common now with wide screen monitors) a top menu item is only as deep as it is long. It's still easier for being 2D but it isn't infinite. *more accurately it's a mathematical model that tells you how long it takes to acquire a target with a mouse. I have no actual proof that speedy = easy.
  • mistercow 13y ago
    The problem with that is that Unity hides the menu items until you mouse over the menu bar (at least in 12.04; maybe that's changed since). Mystery meat is the ultimate anti-Fitts. Of course, it looks like that behavior will be the same in this new mode, which is sort of the worst of both worlds from a Fitts' law perspective. I think the Fitts' law issue is a bit irrelevant though. If you want to use menu items quickly, you use the keyboard.
  • wvenable 13y ago
    Exactly how relevant is Fitt's law? Perhaps it made sense when nobody knew how to use a mouse. My screen is littered with click-able elements (hello Hypertext) and I have no problem hitting any of them. The menu in this window isn't even the most important or used element on my screen right now.
• nilkn 13y ago
  On OS X at least, I rarely use those menus and essentially always have my windows tiled (so that having every menu bar show up on every window would actually take up a lot of space). The only time my windows aren't tiled is the rare case when I have one maximized, in which case the top is already the correct location.
• lucian1900 13y ago
  I find it works great on OS X together with the dock. Unity's problem is that it sometimes hid the global menu and it moved the window chrome in the same place on maximisation.
• emehrkay 13y ago
  Ubuntu's implementation of it is a terrible design. Especially with the way the menu items would fade away if you weren't hovering over them. The approach works very well in OS X