People expect the backlight colours on the unity launcher to mean something.

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad]

I've tested Unity on some innocent users. By that, I mean people who
have little or no experience with Ubuntu or other distros and aren't
coloured by politics or expectations from previous versions of Ubuntu.
The two most common questions I get is 1) what does that blue point on
the Ubuntu button mean and 2) what do the different colours in the
launcher mean? Once I've explained that blue dot, they all say "oh,
ok" and that's the end of it. It does require an explanation though,
and I think that means it isn't obvious enough. The identifier showing
which window is calling for attention, certainly is not obvious
enough.

But I had no answer to what the different background colours on the
launcher meant. I had to investigate it. It seems that the background
colour is chosen by the most dominant foreground colour of the icon.
Firefox, Nautilus, Xchat and Ubuntu One all have orange as a dominant
colour, so they get an orange background. Gcalctool, Gedit and Totem
have grey as a dominant foreground colour, so they get a grey
background. This doesn't seem like a good solution to me. People,
including myself, expect the background colour to have some sort of
meaning. Since I didn't have the answer myself, I thought it'd be
interesting to see what people would guess those colours to mean. Most
had no idea and had no basis to even make a guess, but I did get some
replies from current users of Ubuntu. These are some of the answers
I've received, from various people:

* It depends on the vendor. Free software gets one colour and
proprietary apps get another.
* It depends on the toolkit. Gtk apps get one colour and Qt-apps a
different colour.
* It depends on category. Office applications get a grey background
colour and communication applications are orange.
* It depends on Ubuntu One. Synced apps are orange and non-synced are grey.

I think these ideas are all interesting, mostly because absolutely
no-one guessed the correct answer; that it's only aesthetics. It seems
to me that this has to be reconsidered. I think I believe that the
best solution is for all apps to have the same background colour when
running and another when they're not running. Orange and grey seems to
be fairly decent choices. I'm not sure about this. But I am completely
convinced that the colours should either be the same for all apps or
have a deducible meaning,

Has this been discussed at the UDS? What are the current thoughts?

Best regards,

Jo-Erlend Schinstad