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Risky?Risky?Posted Mar 25, 2010 2:17 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165)Parent article: Ubuntu and window controls
It's pathetic to find them describing sliding buttons around on the window margin as innovative and "risky". Here's a hint, Mark: you won't "catch up to the big guys" by sliding buttons around. If your designers think this is innovation, you need to fire them and hire new designers.
Most likely nobody thought it through, and now they're just blowing smoke about "innovation" to distract people from their procedural failings.
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Risky? Posted Mar 25, 2010 3:48 UTC (Thu) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link]
I don't think that's the case. I believe Shuttleworth when he says he has a new feature in mind. The big question of course is: will this feature negate all the bad blood it has created between the Ubuntu dictators and their users? They really made it much more difficult for themselves to gain broad acceptance for this feature, since it will be known as "that feature that caused my buttons to move around".
upsets Users for a reason Posted Mar 25, 2010 4:46 UTC (Thu) by tdwebste (guest, #18154) [Link]
Moving the window buttons from right to left is like changing the kbd
People use habit to speed up repetitive task, which happen to include window
upsets Users for a reason Posted Mar 25, 2010 5:50 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] The only thing that sucks is that the 'close window button' is much too close to the edit menu.People _very_ frequently use that window for all sorts of stuff. Mostly copy-n-pasting. For some people it's one of the more frequently used menus in any application. Closing out the window is very destructive. Especially since Linux copy-n-paste is broken for non-freedesktop-compliant applications (like firefox and most other browsers). If you copy something and close out a window you lose what your copying. Putting a destructive item like that just spaced a pixel or 3 away from one of the most frequently utilized UI elements in a application is just not good design. Going to copy-n-paste and missing the edit menu by mere millimeter of hand movement can mean losing hours of works. Even just minutes of work is extremely bothersome. "Oh, look, I moved my hand by the distance of a hair and now instead of pasting this hour-long message I typed up, I lost everything! Yay!" You don't need to be a expert in anything to understand that. It's like placing a jar of white powdered rat poison next to the sugar in your cupboard. As far as Apple goes, it works out just fine because the menu items are not in the window, but at the top of the screen. So there is no conflict like there is for Windows or for Linux.
upsets Users for a reason Posted Mar 25, 2010 9:54 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]
I agree with the main gist of your post, but the part about Apple having a different situations is not entirely true. A huge number of Mac applications have a tool bar stripe right below the window buttons, and tool bars, much like the edit menu, is a very frequently used UI element.
upsets Users for a reason Posted Mar 25, 2010 16:00 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
> Putting a destructive item like that just spaced a pixel or 3 away from one of the most frequently
> utilized UI elements in a application is just not good design.
Any application that tosses your unsaved changes when you hit the close button, without so much
Of course, do you have a point regarding the interaction between closing a document when it *is*
upsets Users for a reason Posted Mar 25, 2010 16:10 UTC (Thu) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link] Even when it's a seemingly non-destructive action, it's annoying. If I close a PDF I'm reading, or a web page, I have to find it again (somehow - history in the browser, knowing where it is in the filesystem), and get back to my previous position. I've also lost my train of thought, and have to settle back in, as I've been distracted by finding the document again.
upsets Users for a reason Posted Mar 27, 2010 9:50 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
> Any application that tosses your unsaved changes when you
> hit the close button, without so much as prompting you is > simply broken...the close button should never actually be > destructive.
What a pretty idea.
Unfortunately it runs into trouble when it encounters complex
upsets Users for a reason Posted Mar 27, 2010 15:08 UTC (Sat) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
My browser *does* do that, and I *am* happy. I haven't noticed it having any false positives.
It says:
Are you sure you want to close this window?
You have entered text on Comment editor [LWN.net]. If you close the window, your changes will
[Cancel] [Close]
Risky? Posted Mar 26, 2010 10:10 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
The only precedent I can think of is when Apple introduced MacOS X and did a similar move of the buttons from right to left. However, that was an entirely new operating system with a completely different look and feel, which is very different to an Ubuntu upgrade.
Moving the buttons around does seem pointless, and I strongly suspect it was not properly tested for usability - that would at least have caught the tendency to click one of these buttons when trying to click the Edit menu.
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