U
So, what have we learned this week?
Everyone wants a home
No one can agree on what home is
Some people like the desktop "stuff on your desktop" paradigm, others hate it
New Unity8 already provides features we're used to seeing on a home screen, but not somewhere that is a home screen
Quite a few shades of gray here. I don't think we'll be able to reach consensus for everyone without just getting in and doing something, then taking the feedback from that. It's really hard to describe dynamic functionality in words and sometimes it doesn't make sense until it's put in front of you.
Personally, I think Kugi said it best early on:
I guess I could live without "home" until we get a great idea that's really a game changer
Let's try some things out and see what sticks, starting at the simplest first. The best ideas will naturally float up and get traction behind them. As they develop past their initial stages, we'll see more development toward interfaces which are consistent at every point.
I must reiterate that (since my job title is "development manager" and I feel the need to protect the time of our paid and volunteer developers) I do not support adding lots more settings or compromising between ideas. I truly believe we can make one really good way to use a mouse, keyboard, and/or touchscreen on any size personal device and the only way we'll do that is by working together. If that is totally not to someone's liking, we are not the only mobile operating system.
So, to put what is next more concretely:
We may experiment with Jan's idea to tap the background (it's only a few lines of code to change what tapping there does) and ask for feedback from small groups.
Otherwise, we don't want to make any huge changes to new Unity8 before it is released to Stable the first time. We'll release then iterate.
Go out and make.
