Shuttleworth reaffirms Canonical's lead design role in Ubuntu
markshuttleworth.com
markshuttleworth.com
It's really important that such fundamental apps are stable. Mom and grandma don't want to migrate their photos from F-Spot to <photo app of the year>. That is a pretty cruel task to burden average people with.
Best of luck to them though, and I agree that they have a better chance of mainstream success than any other distro. However, it's still going to be a lot of work to get there. Windows and OS X are not standing still.
And frankly, it would be nice if they could have one which actually worked.
But to come back to the topic, the author of the parent comment is right - it is already difficult for old people to get used to their application, but if then every 6 month the applications for photos is changing it is a pain. So for my mother in law we go with Ubuntu LTS. I am a little bit worried how it will work out with the next LTS if it is going to be Unity :D
"Many English speakers use "begs the question" to mean "raises the question"; for example, "this year's deficit is half a trillion dollars, which begs the question: how are we ever going to balance the budget?" Many philosophers and prescriptive linguists deem such usage incorrect. Academic linguist Mark Liberman recommends avoiding the phrase entirely."
The last version had promise, but was somewhat half-finished. This time it's pretty good (though it still has bugs).
I love all the changes that make tiny netbook screens more usable (auto-hiding dock, the dissapearing menu bar, easy access to other apps, e.g. music skip, via the menu bar, auto-hiding scrollbars).
I'm somewhat unique in having a touchscreen netbook. It's mostly for the kids but the touch-able dock seems to be working for them.
For me, I like that they've went with a power-user friendly keyboard launcher similar to Blacktree's Quicksilver for Mac OS X (which Apple later copied into Spotlight).
Less importantly, I like the looks and the general simplification of the UI.
But this is all fine. They're trying new shit. I wouldn't complain if it was just that. It's the heel-digging that bothers me. It seems that Mark Shuttleworth has, rhetorically, tied his reputation somewhat to the success of these projects and especially to Unity. That is, it will be hard for him at this point to just say "well we tried something new, it didn't work out like we hoped, and now we're going to iterate on the next thing." If you listen to him it's as though their new desktop is already a rousing success. If you use Ubuntu and you are hoping they switch back to another desktop in a later release I would humbly suggest that you switch to a different OS. With a more traditional business model (i.e. if they sold the OS) they would immediately sack Mark and switch strategies with someone who isn't so married to its success, when sales fell off a cliff. That's not going to happen.
For most applications, having the menu bar at the top of the screen is not a problem at all (the only exception I run into frequently being Gimp but then that application has always been an interface nightmare).
Probably for most "regular users" the dumbing down of the interface that Ubuntu is ramming down users' throats is a good thing. It seems to me the intent is to build a system that gets out of your way so you can get work done and from where I'm standing it already does that pretty well. YMMV of course :-)
Its more or less what Linus independently talked about.
Anyway you look at it - the terminal icon behavior is pretty asinine (IMHO - OSX doesnt do it that way). My productivity goes down drastically on Unity.
Instead I can use synapse, gnome-dock, etc. and get the same "shiny" without losing productivity.
If you've got a dock, it's difficult to manage several windows of the same application: either each gets its own icon, but then you've got two identical icons in there with no way to see which is which; or you subsume them under one icon, but then what happens when you click it? You can open a sub-menu to access the various instances, you could open the most recently used one, or you could bring all of them to the front.
Unity basically does the latter. I like docks, but I don't like having to click twice to access an application, so it works well for me.
Windows 7 does it very well: it just pops up small "previews" of all the windows. That's what OSX does by keeping the left-button pressed on the icon (it switches to app-exposé), but without the click and in a cleaner manner.
OSX's (and apparently unity's) behavior of bringing a random window to the front when you click it is helpful when you only ever have a single window for your application. Otherwise it's not generally very useful.
In other words, if you're already working with an app, clicking the icon brings all other app windows to the front. If you're not working with the app, clicking once show the most likely useful window, clicking twice shows all others.
It feels very natural for me. I specifically prefer it to the way Windows 7 does it with its window previews. Crucially, there is no dedicated interface for selecting which application window you want to use. By bringing all app windows to the front, I can just immediately use the window I was looking for (as long as I want to use the mouse).
I also doubt that any of his concerns are relevant to non-power users, who seem to be the demographic that Ubuntu tries to target.
That's fine. People are saying (I think) that sane defaults and good design choices are important.
Where the problem comes is that there's no need to exclude power users. You just hide all the stuff in a text config file. That makes a lot of sense because these are the people who tend to review and blog about the product, and if they're giving good reviews and raving about it you're going to ship more.
There was an interesting comment about support: binary blobs leads to easier support because users can't mess it up too much. The answer to that is a big "restore to default" button that backs-up the config and then resets everything.
I don't think Unity is a step in that direction.
If they target "non-power Linux users", a mythical creature indeed, at the expense of power users (i.e. everyone who uses the fucking thing atm) they are more than shooting themselves in the foot, they are blowing their damn brains out.
It remains to be seen what happens with Unity though, some people do like it.
By my count, there are quite a lot of people who have low interest in maintaining a computer and want things to just work on Ubuntu (far less so on other distributions). People who had to use linux for a school project, people who just stumbled on an evangelist at some point, and blindly obeyed the "Install linux, it's better, you will see !!" stuff. Or just people who were a little bit curious.
I see plenty of people around me that don't know (and have low interest in learning) how to do much more than fire up firefox, and who still run Ubuntu. If these are power users, then I'm a sysadmin god.
Also, wives and aged parents of Linux techies.
* OS X does not launch a second window if the application icon is clicked twice. Some like this (I do), some don't, but it's how the Mac UI works, and is a critical part of the window management paradigm in use.
* OS X displays each individual minimized window separately in the dock, and lets you choose a single window to un-minimize with a single click.
* Just clicking the main application icon will not simply un-minimize all windows at once.
* If there are no un-minimized windows, it will un-minimize the oldest.
* If there are un-minimized windows, it will bring them all to front in relative stack order, focusing the topmost, but will not un-minimize anything.
Maybe, but I, and a good number of other people really like it. There's sizable support for unity, and my guess is a lot of non-power users (who are silent on HN) like it even more.
Had to disable it for Firefox the other day, and it's really annoying to have to go back to a window-hosted menu bar. I guess I really ought to get a mac.
The MS Windows-specific alt+tab model means way too many things to choose from without context.
What I'd love in Mac OS X is a standard way that I could drill in - with enough context - using keyboard short cuts to window and then tab level.
Perhaps something like that exists, but I haven't found the consistent way of doing it yet!