Ubuntu AppStore: Like Apple AppStore, but with less Suck | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu AppStore: Like Apple AppStore, but with less Suck

swizec.com

28 pointsSwizec17 comments

Sigh... I wish Linux (and Ubuntu in this case) were better at UI/UX. But still, it's so clearly designed by programmers (not always a bad thing, but sadly more often than not).

So what's called out here as being good? Well. Subcategories. Average users don't respond well to taxonomy, generally. People are also not good at classifying. So in that example shown, what's the difference between "Arcade" and "Sports"? I've played football games in Arcades. Where should users look?

More: "Some items can be bought, others just downloaded" Cool, where can I filter so I only see free apps? Because it's nowhere in the screen shots, and I will bet money that it's the first thing a sizeable percentage of users want to do. Which would be known, had any user testing been done. I hope it was, but I'm guessing not.

I could be nit-picky - "Get Software" vs. "Installed Software" - they're not even the same tense. Imperative tense is commonly interpreted by users as causing an action to happen, not a categorisation. I could go on too, merrily burning karma as I go, but all I see when I look at this is how far it has to go, not how great it is. Don't get me wrong, the Apple version is by no means perfect, but I bet it performs better in tests with actual users.

Someone needs to get a real UX team together and actually sit down for a real project - not "someone and their favourite futuristic GUI idea for the next version". I would hope that Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc. have the budget to do that, but I see little sign of it.

Canonical (the commercial company behind Ubuntu) has hired a number of full-time UX and Mark Shuttleworth, the founder, recently stepped down as CEO to focus full time on leading product design and development. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/mark-shuttleworth-to-s...

I think this is evidence that there's a "real UX team" at work.

"Mark Shuttleworth, the founder, recently stepped down as CEO to focus full time on leading product design and development."

And this is where the high degree of "programmers design" is coming from.

1) I don't think Ubuntu's UI is any better than Apples UI. If anything it's the same bad copy of the Windows 98/2000/XP/7 lineage of program management tools in control panel that linux has beed copying all the way back to RedHat's RPM package management GUI in the early 2000's.

2) The title of the article is "Ubuntu’s app management better than Apple’s" not "Like Apple AppStore, but with less Suck."

at 2) I couldn't decide on a good title, hence some disparity. The URL itself contains a third version.

at 1) Actually GNOME has since forever been an Apple copy, the newest Unity thing even moreso, but I really really like the Launcher. I feel like it's just innovative enough while being sufficiently familiar not to throw me off completely.

I was not bashing your article. I simply thought it was a case of submitters editorializing the titles. I still wish linux would stop copying others (bad) UI and go their own way. If anything, they should be copying Apple's pixel perfect mockup/design process and sharing of design people across projects.

GNOME an Apple copy? Unity's not developed by the GNOME devs but by Canonical. Since Lucid, the behavior of Ubuntu has shifted somewhat to match that of Mac OS X. Traditionally, buttons defaulted to the right hand corner of the window rather than the left and multi-touch tapping has been remapped to match OS X's style (two finger right click, three finger middle). Compiz has the window picker plugin similar to Exposé along with a cover flow-like window switcher. Now you've got he Unity Launcher with Spotlight/Quicksilver/Gnome-Do functionality. The Add/Remove Applications tool has been around since Breezy in 2005, predating even the iPhone App Store, and provided the same functions as the Software Center and the Mac App Store.

GNOME can be tweaked to look like OS X or Windows or whatever you want, but it's because you can mix and match things like themes and window managers. If you just used vanilla GNOME 2.x with Metacity, I don't think you'd find much of a similarity.

You could say that Ubuntu or GNOME3 borrows functions or aesthetics from other contemporary desktop environments, but GNOME "forever been an Apple Copy?"

Calling GNOME an Apple copy is a bit much, but 2.0 was strongly influenced by Apple/NeXT design principals, or at least it seemed that way when it was happening.

What I get from this article is a) apt-get is awesome and b) there's subcategories in the launcher. I completely agree that apt-get is great, and subcategories aren't bad either. However, this has nothing to do with "app stores." apt-get has been around way before the ubuntu software center, and if anything it goes way deeper than just "apps." If anything, this article is just bringing up the point that software management on linux (for the more technically inclined) is better than on mac, something that isn't quite exciting or new.

I think articles like these are just looking for trouble. It immediately stands as being biased, and screenshots completely skew things in Ubuntu's favor. Seriously, "pushiness?" It's a bad thing now to be showing users applications on the home page of a store? Maybe it might get cluttered, but I definitely don't prefer Ubuntu's "Nice clean and unassuming" main page with just a category listing. "The listing is pretty simple?" Now you're just looking for things to say; I'm going to end my comment here before I make the same mistake.

Is it just me, or does the Ubuntu App Store resemble something one would find in Windows? Not sure where the "less suck" comes from.

What about the Apps from the App Store? How many of them have good design?

I love this kind of articles for the fact that they are all ignoring all the background work you have to do in Linux in order to bring your system at a state in which you can work and get what it has to offer. The story is pretty straight yet a lot of people ignore it: Non tech savvy people just wouldn't be able to work with Linux.

Cmd+Space works as a pretty decent app launcher, functioning pretty much exactly the same way as Natty's new Super key which acts a lot like Vista/7's search/start menu.

I still don't see why Ubuntu's is better. It's cool how it slightly blurs the line between installed applications and available applications, but that's it.

Mature title...

"Ubuntu AppStore"?

Purchasable apps -> app store.

Are we pretending anyone actually calls it that?

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