Comment 9 for bug 930148
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| Christopher Kyle Horton (christhehorton) wrote | #9 |
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@zzecool Autohide has to be explicitly opted into, and it has more consistent behavior than intellihide. I guess part of what might be confusing people may also be the nature of intellihide that sometimes your launcher is visible, and sometimes it isn't. At any rate, it's never explained to the user beforehand how it works. If its behavior were described and offered as an advanced option, that might make it more palatable to new users, though I'd be guessing the user testing must have revealed something else wrong with it if Canonical decided to remove it completely. At any rate, it definitely should not be the default.
As for Unity's similarities to other OSes, I'm pretty sure the Mac OS X dock and Windows 7 taskbar neither support intellihide. The former was always visible on every public Mac I've used (disclaimer: never owned a Mac myself), and the Windows 7 taskbar is similar to the options Unity now gives for its launcher in that it's either always visible or reveals itself when the user mouses the side of the screen it is on. People can expect these behaviors because they have seen them in the operating systems they have previously used, but intellihide might be an alien concept to them.
Looking back over your first comment (#2), I see you mention issues with screen space and seeing the information present on launcher icons with autohide set. The first one is easy enough to address: the Appearance settings give a slider to adjust the icon size, which can be brought all the way down to 32px if so inclined. For the second one, the launcher can still be revealed by mouseover if the user wants to see what their current status is on the progress bars for their various apps. I agree that it doesn't do a sufficient job of asking for user attention when an icon starts glowing while the launcher is hidden, but that has already been reported as bug #770092.
With regards to your HUD comment and papukaija's question about moving the window buttons to the menu bar for maximized windows, the best I can say is that if they haven't been removed yet, they must not have been shown to be confusing to users in testing. I'm a college undergraduate, not a Canonical employee, so I only know of what has been discussed in blog posts and announcements.