I'd love to see a justification for the current design but anyway, the lenses and dash need to be combined into one single menu. There should be one single search bar, one simple way to get there and one "unified" result page. These results obviously need to be structured better but having separate "places" icons is not the solution. There is a variety of reasons for that.
In the current implementation the "menu" is always at the same spot and looks the same no matter how it was invoked. One is drawn to click always on the BFB in the upper corner which is the easiest to hit to close and open all menus. With 3rd party lenses it's particularly bad. I often clicked on the dash only to realize I was in the wrong menu after a second or so when no expected results popped up. It slows the user down and increases mental overhead. One first needs to think which lens to click on, then search for it (only the BFB is always at the same spot). What if I change my mind half way in my search? I need to exit and reenter a different view. What if I can't remember where it was what I'm looking for? This is an increasing problem with every additional lens you install. It clutters the interface, takes up valuable space and above all it's simply not necessary and the alternative is more elegant and more user friendly. There's one searchbar everyone already uses, no matter the experience one has or the OS one is running: Your favorite internet search engine. It's the most powerful and simple user interface one could think of. It scales perfectly for every kind of user and it scales no matter how much data you throw at it. Try to do that with a WIMP interface. In the end the command line did win... That level of elegance, flexibility and power is what the Unity dash should aspire to. It could take a lot of clues from Google and Bing: The sidebar to search by date, special commands and operators (like inurl: or site: which could translate into filetype, tag, metadata...), different views depending on what data one searches for (icons for apps, thumbnails for media and text for documents), a clever sorting and matching algorithm but most importantly a universal search. It should be able to find anything be that content of local docs, pdfs on the network, music by metadata in your ubuntu one cloud or software available in the software center. From current browsers it could take the automatically generated "most frequently used" (in the new tab pages) and the concept of bookmarks/favorites (which are simple to create and delete). Some aspects are unique to Unity as an application and files menu such as quickly browsing all apps. This should be streamlined as well. For example one large "browse apps" button which expands a view of all installed applications collapsible by category. For non-touch devices this should be a huge grid but a list so everything fits on the screen without scrolling. Finally it needs to do all that fast, Chrome fast: get the results before you even could finish typing... I'll be honest with you: Right now Unity doesn't do much. It's just compiz with a global menu and the only really new thing is the launcher which is worse in many ways than already existing docks. There isn't much left to do on the WM side of things, pretty boring in fact (just fix that old remember position thing). Therefore this isn't going to change fundamentally with "2.0". In the long run I guess focus will shift to the applications but the one thing that needs a lot of love and could be the main selling point for Unity is the Dash/Lenses architecture. _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
