It all started from a philosophy based on Fitt's Law, which was very
popular when Unity and Gnome 3 were being designed. What Fitt's Laws say
is that the corners are the easiest target to hit with a mouse. Hot
corners became popular. The Unity launcher originally had the launch
button in the actual corner, but it was decided that close buttons were
used more often.
Regarding the launcher position, remember that Unity started life as the Netbook Remix, being on 9" screens that had 600 vertical pixels. On laptops, 720-768 is still quite common. Do you want to take away 48 usable pixels from that dimension, or would you rather use some of the 1200 pixels from the horizontal one? Putting the launcher and the close buttons on the left with indicators on the right means that everything concerning applications happens in the top left, and everything concerning the system happens in the top right.
So pretty much, while you're working, you just get muscle memory and that's good enough. You don't need to aim. Although I don't like global menus, they follow Fitt , as well. You don't need to aim at the menu bar, you just slam your mouse up yo the top of the screen.
Unity is extremely well-designed from a usability perspective. It just isn't useful to me because it lags too much and the Dash's combined results aren't often pertinent. (The Dash is often like searching the web back in 2001.) I hope that Unity 8 fixes both of those problems, because I really like the philosophy behind it.
Regarding the launcher position, remember that Unity started life as the Netbook Remix, being on 9" screens that had 600 vertical pixels. On laptops, 720-768 is still quite common. Do you want to take away 48 usable pixels from that dimension, or would you rather use some of the 1200 pixels from the horizontal one? Putting the launcher and the close buttons on the left with indicators on the right means that everything concerning applications happens in the top left, and everything concerning the system happens in the top right.
So pretty much, while you're working, you just get muscle memory and that's good enough. You don't need to aim. Although I don't like global menus, they follow Fitt , as well. You don't need to aim at the menu bar, you just slam your mouse up yo the top of the screen.
Unity is extremely well-designed from a usability perspective. It just isn't useful to me because it lags too much and the Dash's combined results aren't often pertinent. (The Dash is often like searching the web back in 2001.) I hope that Unity 8 fixes both of those problems, because I really like the philosophy behind it.