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[Ayatana] A realistic vision of the next iteration of Unity
Hello everybody!
After I've taken part in a lot of discussions since the release of Ubuntu 11.04 I've finally come up with a complete list (for the moment) of features and changes which I and hopefully the rest of the Ubuntu community would like to see implemented. Since it's a rather extensive list have I grouped every topic into sections and accompanied all the features/changes with mockups.
I had problems with taking screenshots of the dash and context menus, I later found that this was a bug, so I made many of the UI-elements from scratch by referencing some Natty Alpha screenshots I found (until I thought of taking pictures in a virtual machine). If you need a Unity photoshop template you can download the PSD-file here:
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Lenses - Dash
As the lenses are currently implemented they are not as effective little applications as they were originally planned to be. First of all, the lenses inhabiting the launcher are just wasting launcher space. By searching in the dash you still get the results from the lenses which are installed by default on a Ubuntu 11.04 installation, without needing to go through their respective launchers.
When I first heard of lenses I was intrigued but later when I learned that every lens would take up valuable launcher space they just felt unnecessary. I wouldn't want to explore new lenses if they were going to occupy my launcher bar. But I think that by including them into the dash we would more effectively handle lenses. There would only be one "lens" - the dash - and within it you could specify further which lens you would like to use if you aren't happy with the search results. My guess is that most people are using the dash to search for files and applications, much like they do with programs as Gnome-Do so this would be the default search feature. But as you can see in the image provided below you can see how easy it would be to search from another lens:
(Note: The icons used for other services are taken off the internet and I haven't looked up the license terms for them)
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Launcher bottom area
In the previous mockup you might have noticed that in the bottom of the launcher is a bar with the same height as the top panel and the same width as the "Ubuntu button" (Sorry for not knowing the correct terminology). I've removed the trash/wastebasket from the launcher since it has been noted several times in the ayatana discussions that it can just as easily be accessed from within Nautilus and isn't important enough to take up a whole launcher. Though it's very important that new users to Ubuntu are finding familiar elements to their previous OS of choice (e.g. OS X or Win) and both provide a clear trash launcher/shortcut. So instead of removing it completely I integrated it into the bottom area of the launcher together with the most important part of this area...
I don't know what to call the button farthest down in the left corner since it's a multifunction button. As default it triggers the workspace switcher, this enables us to remove it from the launcher, and to be fair it wasn't a very good place for it to be to begin with. Sure it's on the edge of the screen but having it in the bottom corner makes it incredibly easy to access (Fitt's Law), very much like the "show desktop"-button in Win7. Now you can just through the cursor into the corner and almost always hit it instead of having to aim for it on the launcher.
But since there are so many ways of switching windows I figured that it should be configurable to trigger the function which the current user prefer. By providing a context menu to it together with options to set one of the following (are there more alternatives?) as default: Workspace Switcher, Spread, Expo mode, "Alt+Tab", and "Show desktop".
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Toggle background lighting as default and window management
You might also have noticed that the launchers have their background lighting set to toggle. In a default Ubuntu 11.04 installation all launchers have brightly colored backgrounds, this has been shown confusing for new users (source email: "[Ayatana] Fwd: Re: People expect the backlight colours on the unity launcher to mean something") since they expect the color to mean something. I also like that running applications are shown more clearly instead of just the arrow on the left side of the launcher. It's much easier to switch between running applications by the launcher with this.
I know that the launcher behaves more like a dock than a task bar but we have had bunch of discussions on app-centric vs window-centric and I think in everyone of them we've agreed on that we should make users coming from both OS X and Win should be somewhat familiar with how it all works. It's also incredibly frustrating to work with many open windows of the same application and expose or scale doesn't provide any information of what the different windows contain if it's either a terminal window or a text document.
So I propose that either enable expo mode for the current application on double clicking the launcher, but then also provide close and minimize buttons and a text box with the window title for both Expo mode and Spread mode. Or implementing a Win7 like popup.
The Win7 method has been argued many times since the delay on showing the popup heavily cripples the work flow but this could be fixed with a very minimal delay so that it doesn't flicker a bunch of popups when scanning the launcher quickly but as soon as it slows down the popups will start to show. Together with this and on mouse click showing both the popup and latest used window it could work. It could be implemented like this:
I also made a small but significant change: making the launcher "background bubbles" look less prominent. Right now when they aren't running and background light is set to toggle it looks like the launcher is inhabited by bubbles. That's why I faded the background just a bit, maybe it can be done more or be redesigned but it look a little bit better at least. Here is an image showing the change, the left half is how it looks normally and the right half is it with faded backgrounds:
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Launcher overflow
Am I correct to assume that the only reason why there needs to be a Unity 2D project is that the launcher utilizes 3D effects? In that case I think the overflow of launchers could be handled with a glow on the side where the launcher overflows. In my mockup you have to imagine that the glow was on the bottom earlier but the user scrolled down to the bottom launcher so that the overflow is now on top. This is because in the mockup I chose to have it on top to be able to show the launcher bottom area without any additional distractions. Nuff said:
A glow effect like this could provide the same functionality without 3D-effects.
There is also a problem with the scrolling of the launchers. If you scroll down to select an application the launchers automatically scroll backup after selection. If I scroll down it means that I want to work with the applications in focus, not the ones which are set to "keep in launcher".
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Ubuntu Welcome Center
Today when a new user uses the OS for the first time there is no way for him/her to know what do next. There is a help program but how is he/she supposed to find out about it? When I first started using Ubuntu/Linux I had to go online and read tutorials in blog posts. This isn't a professional way of handling this problem - leaving it to somebody else. Windows feature a welcome center program and even Linux Mint does. So why doesn't Ubuntu? I made this mockup earlier for the thread "[ayatana] Ubuntu Welcome Center". Imagine it without "install ubunu-restricted-extras" and add a checkbox for "show on startup" and maybe add an "Open the browser to go online"-button:
The discussion in that thread turned away from the subject and became about the Yelp vs Ubuntu Tour project instead. But the main idea is that we should give new users a tour of some kind of the OS, much like what the Ubuntu Tour people are working on but perhaps integrated into Yelp but providing the tour with a much improved UI.
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Global menu
The global menu is a much discussed topic in the ayatana discussions, some can be found in the "global menu in oneric oceleot (11.10)"-thread and the "Thoughts on unity design"-thread. I myself want to remove the top panel completely since it removes the choice of how to implement a menu from the developers. Chromium has a great one button menu and Opera and Firefox as well but they cannot benefit from their design choices if they are forced to use a global menu. I would much rather see that chromium's tabs took the space of the title bar/global menu instead. It also prevents developers to design relatively to the top edge of the screen (Fitt's law) since the top panel takes away that possibility for them. Please read the earlier mentioned discussions to get a complete overview of the pros and cons.
I myself have come to the conclusion that it cannot be removed without a complete overhaul of the OS, branching away from GNOME completely. The app indicators would have to be replaced because all third party indicators are designed for horizontal panels. So therefore the panel probably must stay for the time being. But I think that there should at least be a configuration option to turn off the global menu.
Some earlier design sketches which maybe can trigger your imagination:
(clarification: the menu is shown on default and it's state is remembered per application)
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Other thoughts
Launcher context menu
It would be good to have a context menu for the launcher with some logical options:
Launcher alignment
Please enable us to align the launchers to both the right and bottom side of the screen. Blogs often have the content on the left side and navigation to the right, since we read from left to right we will always be fed information from the launcher and never be able to fully focus on the content instead. So please make it configurable for those who want to move it.
Design consistency
Quick lists and regular context menus, Dash and Ambiance ... it looks completely different. Please aim for better consistency.
Ubuntu software center and the repositories
As always I have some thoughts about the USC but haven't actually made a mockup of my own. Anyways I'd just like to say that it needs a revamp, preferably removing the sidebar and integrating it somehow better into content view. Or follow this mockup's example:
OMG! Ubuntu also brought up PPA's and their use today. They are originally meant to work as way for developers to test the applications but this has been misused often and serves as an alternative distribution form instead of the repositories. This is partly because that no application gets upgraded between the Ubuntu release cycles. So if an application like firefox 5 gets released in the middle of a release cycle we have to wait to have the most up to date software. This isn't how it's supposed to be, the users should always have the most up to date software available. So this needs to be fixed. Read the following article if you want to learn more:
A unified Ubuntu design and development platform
There are so many ways to discuss ideas and so few to get them implemented. There are no good way to submit feature requests except for filing a bug report, what's up with that? We have mail discussions, Ubuntu brainstorm, Launchpad, and practically no feedback from the developers. We need a place where all ideas and bugs can be viewed organized by both designers, developers and the community. Not by splitting it all up into a new forum but by removing the existing and start from scratch. In practice an in and out channel between Canonical, other developers and the rest of the community.
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Wow! I Hope I haven't forgotten anything now, this took some time :) Thank you very much for reading and I hope we get a good Oneiric Ocelot to look forward to!
