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Do You Like the "Left" Dock in Ubuntu Unity Desktop?

Although he's not the only one but in a recent post written by David Sugar.. it is an interesting read though. Anyhow, he goes on to various aspects of the desktop but the one that kinda got me interested was about the location of the dock.

Left or Right?...

Now in the recent past some users requested to the users change the location of the dock according to their preference. But Canonical refused this by saying it's not possible because it'll jeopardize the whole OS because they'll have to make certain change to the whole OS as result.

Anyway, as I was saying, David pointed out the fact that if you're a right-handed person + as most of us are "trained", we read text from the upper left to the right thus having a dock at the left side of the screen (unmovable) is a bit frustrating, sometimes.

Not just because it takes a "valuable" space from the left side but also again for right-handed individuals when it comes to launching and accessing apps in the Dock.. it is so much easier if it was to the right rather than to the left. And also concerning the fact that most of the never Laptops and Touchscreen based devices (tablets etc) come with smaller screens (16:9 aspect-ratio) that has lesser heights... maybe, just maybe if Canonical could move it to the bottom like with the Apple... What do you think?.

But I don't think that they'll ever put it at the bottom like in Apple Mac OS/X because then Unity could be called a cheap replica of Mac which would destroy all of their hard work or the reputation in that matter. And most importantly even if you're a left-handed person, I think it would be better to let the users the ability to change the location of the Dock rather than making it unmovable.

What are your opinions on the subject??.

5 comments:

Charles said...

I would like to see both gnome 3 & Unity make the location user configurable.

Gayan said...

Hey Charles,

Yes, I'd like that too. And many, like ourselves asked Canonical for that "feature", but here's the response from Mark Shuttleworth...

“I'm afraid that won't work with our broader design goals, so we won't implement that. We want the launcher always close to the Ubuntu button.”

Anonymous said...

I HATE IT and it's about half an hour that I'm trying to figure out how to put it in the "normal" place. Right click doesn't work and the system settings doesn't say anything about it.
For the record, I'm an interaction designer and if I can't do that, probably many others can't either. I just stumbled to this page trying to search for a solution on google.

Gayan said...

@Anonymous,

Ya... it's really frustrating... :/ if you find a way to do it, let us know :D

Anonymous said...

No. It is ridiculous. The user tends to keep his eyes in the upper middle part of the screen, therefore, the dock should also be in that part of the screen. How every UI designer under the sun gets such a basic concept wrong is beyond me.

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