I really admire Shuttleworth and the rest of the Ubuntu design team for being courageous about making basic changes to the desktop UI. Open source tends to produce a lot of design-by-committee or completely undesigned software, so having somebody making big decisions and experimenting is really valuable. Nobody else big is really doing this.
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.
... and have the ambition of outdoing OSX in the user experience department.
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.
While this specific article may be focused on a UI change for the netbook, Shuttleworth's focus extends to the ubuntu UI in general. In fact, it may be wise choice to distinguish between pure desktop and netbook, time will tell.
Care to elaborate? Apple's products and Ubuntu are entirely different in how they are managed. While Apple's is an almost entirely closed ecosystem, Ubuntu's is almost entirely open.
What's wrong with someone trying to innovate in the PC desktop space?
I don't consider copying a single menu bar as it is used on Macs since 1984 as an innovation. I detested the single menu bar on my Mac classic and I always thought the Windows way were preferable -- back then I was a Mac user. And I always found the arguments that Mac zealots put forwards in favour of the single menu bar, were ridiculous. And this post reminds me much to much of the justifications of back then. Those arguments were ridiculous in the 1990s and they still are in the 2010s.
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.
> But they shouldn't dislocate it from the window to which it belongs.
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.
"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.
It's not very consistent across applications, though. Hopefully Ubuntu's work here will also help more applications work with other implementations of it.
The article cites this option will be available. But on higher resolutions, it doesn't make sense, because it increases the distance between the window and the menu, requiring more mouse movement.
I wonder if the differences of opinion here are due to different mouse acceleration. Ideally you should be able to hit a global menu with a small mouse movement even on a large monitor, but with improper acceleration it would be more work.
Which is why I don't understand Apple's terrible default mouse acceleration profile. On a 27" iMac, even set to "fast" it's 2 swipes of the mouse across the desk to go corner to corner.
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).
This is probably the only netbook remix feature I want ported to the regular builds. Globalmenu is broken in subtle but dealbreaking ways, and getting a large part of the ubuntu team on it should sort it out so I can finally use it.
I hope there's a reasonable path to including it in the standard desktop.
I don't think they could port this to the regular builds without it being even more broken than globalmenu.
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.
Netbook Remix is essentially just a different default panel layout, window manager and startup applications. Adding whatever widget to the panel that handles this to a normal Ubuntu install should be most of the effort required to use these changes on a normal install. It depends how it's implemented, though.
> 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.
While I don't like global menus in general, it makes a lot of sense for netbooks, I think. I look forward to seeing this one come to fruition. That said, I agree with one of the commenters on the OP that pointed out the difficulties posed by toolbars. Hopefully, Ubuntu can come up with some good solutions to the toolbar problem, too.
I do indeed prefer menus and toolbars to be close to the information I am manipulating. The one contextual menu bar on the top of the screen made a lot of sense on the early days of the Lisa and the Mac, but unless you get used to keyboard shortcuts, it does not make a lot of sense to move your mouse to monitor 1 when what you want to do is with something in a window on monitor 2 (or 3).
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?
Do you have two large monitors? I find OS X so poorly adapted to my 30" + 27" Monitor, that I frequently find myself just using my 17" MacBook Pro - it's not as much real estate, but the large monitor is so clumsy, that, except in very specific tasks where I need to have multiple windows going simultaneously so I can see tasks happening at the same time, I get very little extra value, and sometimes _lose_ productivity from having to move my mouse Waaaay over to the first screen from something that might be (literally) feet away.
OTOH, click targets on the wrong screen are torture.
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.
I find that a lot of applications do not need to show the menu most of the time. For most users, in my experience, the menu bar need only be shown some of the time (with some exceptions such as word processors and large programs). Toolbars are usually much more important, as are keyboard shortcuts.
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.
There are outstanding questions about the usability of a panel-hosted menu on much larger screens, where the window and the menu could be very far apart.
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.
Fitt's law says that the edge of screen is easier to target, that is not the same thing as being closer.
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.
Ubuntu has been making a lot of UI changes lately. I can't figure out if they're really being innovative or if they're trying to copy Apple.
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.
I'd like to ask why people think "copying apple" is a bad thing. They "copied microsoft" with how KDE looked before and now with a similar look with Gnome to OS X.
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)
I can't speak for anyone else, but I didn't say copying Apple is a bad thing. I think copying Apple is a pretty decent way to design a UI if you're not good at it yourself. It is, of course more admirable to come up with a good, original design, but I'm happy about anything that results in a good user experience.
You didn't say it, but generally when it comes up that's the implication. So I took the next leap and went on the defense trying to turn it into something awesomer. =)
I thought the article made it pretty clear that they aren't following in Apple's footsteps. They are working on an optimal environment for netbooks (which Apple doesn't even make), and trying to go beyond the Apple UI to something even better. Do you mistrust these statements for some reason?
Getting this working would be great -- not because I want one menu to rule them all; but because I like the flexibility.
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 have to confess that I've been using gnome-do in Docky mode for the last few weeks and I've only greatly enjoyed it. I have a few small suggestions, like a digital clock perhaps, but so far it's been solid gold.
I'm all for going where Apple has and then going past them in terms of UI decisions like this.
1) How is this better than just autohiding the panel?
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.
Between this and the system tray changes it seems Ubuntu is moving further away from the stock GNOME desktop environment. They're both good changes in theory but I'm not sure it's a good thing to add more fragmentation.
A bit unrelated note, but if vertical screen estate is valuable also in normal laptops, why aren't more people putting the toolbars to the sides ot the screen? As most laptops are widescreen anyway these days.
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.