Hey Sandy, On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 10:54 AM, Sandy Armstrong <[email protected]> wrote: > (What happened to your mail client line-wrapping settings?) > > On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 4:21 PM, Owen Taylor <[email protected]> wrote: >> The maximize button >> =================== >> >> The above was about minimization - but the request was also to remove the >> maximize button. This is a little different since there are more obvious >> ways to maximize a window - the drag to the top gesture or double-clicking >> on the title bar - we're not really talking about removing the feature of >> maximization but just the button. > > I generally applaud the bold changes happening in the shell, but I > disagree with removing the maximize/restore button. I'll paste here a > comment I wrote on Allan's blog: > > 1) Drag-and-drop is very difficult on touchpads, and most people these > days are buying laptops. Drag-and-drop is also undiscoverable.
That depends a lot on the quality of the touchpad too... With a crappy touchpad (and there are a lot of them) it is arguably harder to aim precisely to hit a small button than dragging a large object (titlebar) to a Fittsian infinite edge (top of screen). This is made worse when the maximize button is immediately adjacent to a button that is as opposite in effect as you can get. Two bits of badness converge here. The first is that the cost of a slip in aiming and clicking is unreasonably large. There is no undo for window close. It is definitely not what you wanted to happen. It is relatively difficult to recover from. And in some cases may result in data loss. In every case it results in intense frustration (argh-ing). We don't want the user to ever feel that. The second is the stress involved in aiming at a small target which is intensified by a known cost of a slip. It makes you think. The interface ideally should not interrupt you and draw that kind of attention to itself. These issues were always present in classic window management but become highly problematic with many touch interfaces and especially so with low precision pointing devices. There are three other things that should help in these cases: * using the entire titlebar as a double click target to maximize * using keyboard shortcuts for maximization * in some cases maximizing certain sovereign apps by default (particularly on smaller screens) > 2) Double-clicking the title-bar is undiscoverable. Honestly, I think "discoverability" is one of the more misused critiques of user interface design. There are a lot of reasons for this and I won't cover them. I don't think that discoverability is a prerequisite for a successful interface. Surely, in many cases it helps. But it is just one factor. Gestures (especially touch) aren't discoverable and yet they are extremely useful and powerful. Context menus aren't discoverable and yet they provide a way to access lots of functionality that couldn't otherwise be presented in the visible and discoverable interface. Keyboard shortcuts obviously aren't discoverable most of the time. As you mention above, drag and drop of any kind is not discoverable and yet it has formed the basis of many very successful designs. Discoverability almost always involves learning. You are not born knowing what the "_" icon in every window means. Nor do you intrinsically know what "maximize" means. You learned it at some point. Another trend you are seeing is a bit of a drift away from symbolic representation and indirect action to more tactile direct manipulation. I think this is natural. It feels better somehow. And if it just does that thing I don't need to know the name for that thing. When I throw a window at the top of the screen it gets bigger. I wanted it to get bigger. Cool. I don't have to even know the word for it in tech speak is maximize or know that it is symbolically represented by a square. I don't have any plans to drop the symbolic close button but some successful designs have done this already. WebOS uses a close gesture and no on screen explicit controls. iOS on iPad mostly does away will all forms of window management but in some cases (secondary windows) uses a "Done" button instead of the symbolic version. To summarize, discoverability is only one of the considerations in designing a successful interface. In this case, it wasn't the most important factor. But if you simply cannot get used to life without the maximize button, despite the benefits, or using one of the other approaches mentioned above, feel free to add the button back using the settings. Hope that helps a bit. Jon _______________________________________________ gnome-shell-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
