Single menu bar for Ubuntu
markshuttleworth.com
markshuttleworth.com
There are plenty of alternative window managers for Linux or whatever, but few organizations besides Ubuntu have the inclination and resources to actually make the required changes to the relevant applications such that the desktop feels in some way consistent. And I know ubuntu isn't quite there yet, but it feels like it's making really rapid progress, and it's very encouraging.
Is it really "outdoing OSX" if the UI is being done for a market that Apple isn't and doesn't seem to have an inclination of targeting? At least, for what the UI discussed in the initial link for this topic is about.
The physical form of an 8" netbook isn't designed for the same type of use as a 15" — or even 13" — macbook pro is. Why should the UI be?
What's wrong with someone trying to innovate in the PC desktop space?
If they thought the menu bar takes too much space, they whould work on minimizing it while it's not in use. But they shouldn't dislocate it from the window to which it belongs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts_law
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"Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing", which means it might be less relevant for netbooks, but it still doesn't make it ridiculous.
In other news, Fitts's law is totally irrelevant to the point Shuttleworth is making. The problem he is trying to address is that of screen real estate.
In almost all cases on Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the window is maximised, so the menubar would still be attached to it. This is a part of Shuttleworth's argument.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_Global_menu.png
It's not very consistent across applications, though. Hopefully Ubuntu's work here will also help more applications work with other implementations of it.
It's one of the few areas of OS X that I consider broken by default and needs a 3rd party tool to fix (made more difficult by the Magic Mouse requiring its own drivers).
I hope there's a reasonable path to including it in the standard desktop.
This is only attainable when all windows are always maximized like they are in Netbook Remix, especially in combination with their design choice of having the window title display there by default with the menu appearing on rollover/alt. This all works because they're using a custom (probably non-reparenting) window manager and can do whatever they want.
This has the added bonus of potentially working with third-party apps that they can't diddle with the menus of — in this case they can just draw the window title decorator on top of the menus. They might even just take this approach all the time and avoid the globalmenu weirdness.
> However, it will be straightforward to use this on your desktop too, if you want, and we’d encourage people to try with that configuration.
So yeah, it sounds like they're happy to have people experiment with this in the regular desktop edition, but they're not ready to commit to it in that edition yet.
It's like http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/ but modified to normally display the window title and only display menus on mouseover (hello discoverability).
I am happy this is only for the netbook version. It's a usability nightmare when you have a 30" monitor (or a couple big ones).
Actually, with two monitors, OSX becomes pretty disorienting.
It doesn't bother me too much when I am running a couple terminals and Emacs, or working on a spreadsheet on Google docs, but it would drive me crazy if I had to do it with Word. Specially with two or more 24+ inch screens.
I am curious as to how do you deal with this situation. Keyboard shortcuts or moving the mouse between monitors? How frequent is each situation?
It's a little better with two 24" monitors.
It's a pretty basic usability heuristic that states click targets on the edge of the screen are much more usable than floating targets.
I spend all my desk time on a multi-screen setup, with the built-in screen and a big monitor on its side. Having program launchers and a taskbar (or dock) on a specific screen is not as bad, but having to click on something on screen 1 to do something with a window on screen 2 is just painful.
A right-click on the window decoration/titlebar to show the menu would be a much more elegant solution for many applications. This interaction with the window manager could also introduce some interesting application-specific window management, such as "arrange to fill screen" for gnome-terminal, or "optimize width" for Firefox, for instance.
Fitt's Law means that, in the relevant respect, the edge of the screen is always closer to your mouse than just about anything else.
For example, if you have a very large monitor, or two monitors, you might have to move your perceptual focus far to focus on the menu bar, even though it is at the edge of the screen and easier to hit. Then you might have to move it all the way back to where you were to see what effect the command you just gave had.
KDE had something like this as an option in 2.x and 3.x, though it appears to be gone from 4. It only supported KDE apps and therefore didn't provide a very good overall user experience. I always liked the Mac's global menu bar, so I kind of hope they can pull it off.
Good for them. At this rate Linux will have it's very own unified UI system in place sometime in 2020 and it will be better than both. For that, I can't wait!
(I never use sarcasm, just in case anyone was wondering)
For example, it would be possible to hijack some of the logic and have the current app menu (better: palettes too!) show up as an android app, turning a bt-tethered phone into an input/hotkey device...
I'm all for going where Apple has and then going past them in terms of UI decisions like this.
2) The main reason why this would be normally bad for me is that focus-follows-mouse seems to be incompatible with a global menu. On a netbook most apps are maximized so I can see that as being not so bad.