It’s been a little while since we pimped a mock-up, so here’s a really slick one to make up for it.
Mark Tyrrell linked us to a bug report of his that proposes a solution for the Ubuntu ‘Application Menu’ reveal behaviour in Unity.
He writes: –
The app menu just “appears” when you hover over the panel, this makes it hard to know whether or not this is an app menu in the first place. It also means that unless you can remember the entries you first have to hover anywhere on the panel to see the menu, then continue moving your cursor to the menu you were looking for.
On top of this the window title jumps between 2 different positions based on whether or not a window is maximised, but the app menu remains stationary, it feels inconsistant (sic).
The app menu should reveal based on proximity.”
As is standard fare these days his mock-up is in the form of a live implementation. You can hit the link below to see just what it means.
Too distracting?
One of the plus points of the current way the ‘reveal’ behaves is that it only shows when you specifically want it too. The question of it some people being utterly unaware that it’s there at all is an entirely different topic.
With Marks idea, although I can see the benefit of the proximity-initiated reveal making application menus more discoverable, it assumes that anytime a user moves their cursor towards the top-edge of the screen that they are going to want to see the Application Menu.
Could that get annoying? Maybe.