Author: Andrew
| Date: February 17, 2011
|
| Tags:
11.04,
linux,
mockups,
Natty Narwhal,
ubuntu,
unity
One of the design goals of Unity is to reduce the clutter of the desktop, another is to use space more efficiently.
We hide the menu by default in Unity because the menu provides no useful information to which you can refer just by looking at it, but it puts a lot of detail on the screen which is visual clutter. So, we’ve taken the view that the menu is there if you need it (by moving the mouse to it or pressing Alt) but otherwise isn’t in your view.
Many modern applications are doing without a menu altogether, so in our view, this is a step towards the future, and it will encourage application developers to think about their interfaces and make them more usable by design rather than depending on the crutch of a menu.
The text above is a quote from Mark Shuttleworth is which he talks about the reasons behind the decision to put the menu on the top panel and set it to autohide.
The idea
Based on this, Ubuntu user Andrea Azzarone came up with an idea/mockup to integrate (with autohide) the menu bar in the title bar for ummaximized windows:
