[launcher] feedback too subtle upon launching an application

[Florian Boucault]

When launching an application, the launching feedback (today a glow behind the icon) is too subtle and might go unnoticed.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Do we have a mockup/animation of what the desired feedback is?

[Florian Boucault (fboucault)]

No, we have to make it up.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

So we want a more visible and expressive launching feedback, but it has to remain unobtrusive.
The glow effect is indeed way too subtle in the current implementation.

Since we don’t have a clear idea of how to solve the problem (read: mockups to implement), I’m going to try various possibilities. For each I’ll attach a patch that can be applied to the trunk (lp:unity-2d/0.4) to test. Please test and comment. Feel free to attach enhanced proposals too, and let’s see if we can agree on one of them.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Proposal #1: a larger glow. The size of the glow is increased to 110% of its current size, making it more visible, present.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Proposal #2: make the background of the icon rotate clockwise. Note that the icon itself won’t rotate, I tested this solution and it really felt too much.

[Ugo Riboni (uriboni)]

I tried the other two animations but they didn't convince me much.
I gave it a shot at something that may work, it's in the attached patch (it should apply to trunk with a bit of fuzz).
You can also try moving the animation added by that patch to just the background instead of the entire item.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

Ugo: I tested your patch (in fact I had tried similar effects yesterday), and even though I think a bounce effect would solve the problem nicely, the effect your patch achieves look very mechanical, jerky. Do you know how to smooth it, to make it bounce in a way that feels easy to the eye?

Other remarks on the patch itself:
 - You can remove the glow Image altogether if it’s never shown.
 - I would test setting the max value of the effect to more than 1.0, so that it effectively bounces back and forth, what do you think?

[Florian Boucault (fboucault)]

Bounce and rotation are too intrusive. Larger glow is nice though it has some nasty artifacts. I attach a glow.png that achieves the same effect without the artifacts.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

The enhanced glow image looks good to me (note that with it the patch that modifies its scale is not needed).
I’ll go ahead and merge it.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

I'd like us to change tack on this altogether. For both Unity-2D and Unity:

 * Make the icons the Natty size
 * Drop the "glowing tiles" for icons, so we get shape back
 * Use the tile flash for "starting" animation... keep flashing till
it's started, then stop

So, neither running nor not-running apps get a tile, but we use the
tile-flash for the starting animation. We can consider using it for the
attention-grab animation too. And we can use it also, potentially, for
the focus indication during keyboard interaction.

Mark

[Florian Boucault (fboucault)]

@Mark: that sounds like an interesting plan. I am not sure I am able to visualize just reading it though. Can we involve Otto on this?
Let's open a separate bug that affects Unity and Unity 2D to deal with it (this bug was Unity 2D Maverick specific).

[Florian Boucault (fboucault)]

@Mark: maybe bug #676457 describes what you were describing?

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Florian, it describes part of it, yes. What I'm saying here is slightly
different, though:

 * the backlight should be "off" in the normal case, running or not
 * the backlight should flash when starting the app, and
 * the backlight could also be used to indicate focus in keyboard
navigation through the launcher

Mark