Comment 92 for bug 40872

Folks, here is my dos centavos, dva kopekie, two cents, or whatever. . . .

Note: Distro used is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

1. Allowing physical icons to overlap is just plain messy and un-professional.

Most of the places I have worked for had a bug-rating from 1-4, 1 being "hotter-than-hell" and 4 being "yea, alright already!" However, they also had another bug level - 5 - which was reserved for bugs that - though maybe not hyper-critical - needed to be addressed ASAP because they made the company, or product, look silly, stupid, or maintained by the gorillas at the City Zoo. Things like misspelling the company's name, placing the Corporate Logo as a mirror-image, or on it's side. Or a ridiculously obvious GUI/usability issue that looks like the developer hadn't had his morning coffee yet.

2. My suggestions:
  (a) Create a default size, especially width, (X by Y), that icons must stay within. If an icon represents something that can have a preview, it should be scaled to fit the default icon space. If it's considered worth it, an icon with a preview can explode the preview to a larger, more easily seen size, upon mouse-over. Of course, the preview would be like a tool-tip/text box that can cover a portion of the desktop while the mouse is within it.

  (b) Allow a non-selected icon to show, at most, two lines of it's title with an ellipsis if it was truncated.

  (c) Force the icon label to fit in a space only slightly larger than the icon size itself (i.e. if the icon matrix is X by Y, than the icon label would have to fit within a X+2 width space, wrapping as necessary, and truncated to two lines if not selected.

  (d) Make the icon spacing a ***user-configurable setting*** (<<=== Hint! Hint!) as it is in Windows.

  (e) Create, adopt, and maintain some kind of "User Interface and Usability" standard that - once adopted - would become "mandatory" by consensus - in pretty much the same way that various distributions have rules for how bugs are created and reported, code modules interact, etc. etc. etc. These "rules" are necessary so that everyone is on the same page of the play-book.

Can you imagine what it would be like if every software company out there could just arbitrarily decide how a CD/DVD should be formatted - or if an application developer just decided to write whatever the heck he wanted, willy-nilly all over the hard-drive platters - without regard to what someone else may have done before?

This wouldn't be "bazaar", it would be - literally - bizarre! Along with totally un-workable. Even in a bazaar, booths are laid out in an orderly way, each booth getting only so much space, so that all the vendors are easily accessible to the customers, without stepping on each-other's toes.

  (f) Find out whomever coded the desktop so that different icons could totally overlap and hide each other - hang 'em by their feet, and beat them senseless with a short bat.

Hmmm. . . . You know? THAT might just be the "User usability feedback" method we've been looking for! Finally, developers would take us seriously. . . . (just kidding, but sometimes I am SOOOOO tempted.)

Re: "Copying Windows" (slightly off topic)
It appears that there is a small, but vocal, group that believes that Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora/SuSE/etc. should be as un-like Windows as possible - and they seem to want to be as much like the Mac as they can without being sued.

And that's their right.

However. I'd also like to see a desktop design started that would try to create the same look-and-feel as Windows - short of being sued - because (IMHO) that would greatly help the cross-over user become more relaxed with Linux. And I'd gladly join whatever maintainer group was created to develop this.

What say ye?

Jim (JR)