[indiana-discuss] [desktop-discuss] Indiana desktop UI spec - 2nd draft

[Calum Benson]

On 5 Apr 2008, at 00:20, Stephen Hahn wrote:
>  Is there a usability or ergonomics reason behind the right hand side
>  panel options, versus left-hand side?  (When I use a side panel, I
>  usually put it on the left hand side, because then any panel menus
>  will open to the right.)

Only that the desktop icons go on the left in GNOME, and there's now  
way to change that (other than manually arranging them).  So having  
both the panel and the icons on the left would make it even harder  
than usual to keep any desktop icons peeking out from behind your  
windows, as they'd be displaced towards the centre by the width of the  
panel (which would also just look kind of visually unbalanced and ugly  
IMHO).  Whether that's any worse than having the panel menus open to  
the left is certainly debatable, though.

(From what I've seen of the quick poll so far, though, nobody really  
wants that panel anyway.)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson at sun.com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems