Global menu items should not be entirely hidden

Bug #780517 reported by Fabien Lusseau
This bug report is a duplicate of:  Bug #732653: Menus are hidden by default. Edit Remove
14
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Ayatana Design
New
Undecided
Unassigned
Unity
Incomplete
Undecided
Unassigned
unity (Ubuntu)
Incomplete
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

I came with that in mind, What if you don't know if an application have a menu or not ?

For exemple, you are a newbie. You are opening Firefox, where is the menu ? Nothing appear until you figure out that "He is hidden on the top of the screen".

I think what should be done is making use of the extra space after the title of the application. The title should be first, and after that, the global menu. If there is not enough space, just show what can be shown on the extra space (the lasts entries of the menu, and the firsts ones hidden)

I know this is really confusing, so I send with all that ugly text a little picture of what I have in mind.

By the way, it's not meat to be perfectly like my "mockup", but the idea is to make the menu more easily discoverable and make use of the not used space (the menu could be aligned right or track the window to make use of this extra space)

Revision history for this message
Fabien Lusseau (fabien-beosfrance) wrote :
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Ed Lin (edlin280-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

There's too much "stuff" going on with this design. It's still confusing and it doesn't solve the problem outlined in the first paragraph here:
https://lists.launchpad.net/ayatana/msg05634.html

An IMO better alternative would be to put an icon into the panel and next to it the menu items always visible. However that still doesn't solve much of the other complaints, some of which where discussed in the linked thread. The best solution is to get rid of the global menu concept entirely and instead focus on making full screen applications better at using screen estate and screen edges more effectively. Firefox and Chrome show us how it could be done (no titlebat, tabs on top), other apps might benefit from putting the menu at the top. I'm not going to further repeat myself, see the ayatana list for more...

summary: - Global menu should not be entirely transparent
+ Global menu items should not be entirely hidden
Revision history for this message
Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel) wrote :

Thanks for your report. I'm setting unity tasks to incomplete according to Unity bug triage policy.
On this topic, you can press 'ALT' which will instantly display the menu if there's one.

Changed in unity (Ubuntu):
status: New → Incomplete
Changed in unity:
status: New → Incomplete
tags: added: needs-design
Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

This is not a duplicate of bug 682788, which is about where menus appear on large screens, not about their default visibility. If the "desired change" described there was implemented, this bug would not be fixed.

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