unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ed Lin <edlin280@xxxxxxxxx>]

@everyone in this thread: Thanks for the great response!

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 1:16 PM, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I don't understand why you think a single OS for multiple form factors
> counts as getting something right. The success of iOS, Mac OS X, and
> Android strongly suggests otherwise.

Reinventing the wheel and so on. This is about the underlaying
architecture, not the interface. iOS and Mac OS X share a lot of code,
we don't know the Google's strategy but I'd wager on a fusion of
Chromium OS and Android eventually. Linux kernel is the best example,
embedded to super computer, everywhere it's the same "OS" in its
original meaning. The only large OS vendor who didn't get that
internal fragmentation is bad for its ecosystem and bottom line was,
until now, Microsoft. (It's an oversimplification but off topic
anyway).

> iWork for Mac uses menus heavily. That's one of the reasons iWork for
> iPad has fewer features: there are fewer places to put them.

iWork on OS X makes heavy use of the toolbar and other window level
elements which can be a lot smaller on a pointer based interface. You
don't *have* to use the menu bar at all for most tasks. From a cursory
user survey File->Save is by far the most used menu entry. But as
mentioned Lion is going to change that. For more advanced tasks than
fonts, headers, tables and embedding images (uhm, what's left?) one
might still have to use the nested menu (or just the help->search
box).

Thinking ahead and more people will know iWork from iOS than from OS X
and generally they learn based interfaces before the mouse/keyboard
(i.e. children being introduced to technology...) What will this mean
for their expectations and the mentioned "intuitiveness"? Menu ->
Dodo?

> The App Store is not a typical application. First it is extremely
> simple, and second it is based on the Web page model where people scroll
> to access not just content but functions too. For example, you need to
> scroll to the bottom of a page in the App Store to change the country.
> In a typical application, analogous functions are typically menu items
> instead (e.g. "Tools" > "Language" in LibreOffice).

Which is a general trend for the better or worse. "Webapps", Google,
Chrome OS but also so called "native apps" that in reality are a pay
walled mobile web service. Also it fits perfectly into Apple's vision
of what they understand under a "web company", err walled garden (see
John Gruber and the critiques).


> I am both amused and disheartened when people assume that emulating Time
> Machine or Versions is a matter of putting a "frontend" on btrfs. btrfs
> is neither necessary nor sufficient for that. It is not necessary,
> because Time Machine and Versions are implemented using basically the
> same HFS+ filesystem that Mac OS has been using since 1998. And it is
> not sufficient, because for both features the hard part, 90 percent of
> the work, is the user interface and the application APIs.

Oh, I was playing into your hands. So, what's the excuse now?  ;)
"Switch to Linux/Ubuntu, the only desktop OS that doesn't care about your data?"

HFS and NTFS are old, they hacked around the limitations as far as
they could. We could imitate them and use ext2+stuff(3/4)+more stuff
(like hardlink madness) on top or we could do the right thing and use
a FS which was designed with modern workloads and requirements in mind
and "do the right thing".

Sure, it's more complicated than a front end. But even the simple
volume snapshotting with some package manager integration (already in
Fedora afair) would be a nice start. But that's for another list.

>> On another note: "Launchpad". Sue them! :P
>
> The logo is really similar to Launchpad's old logo, too.
> http://web.archive.org/web/20060611133645/https://launchpad.net/

I remember, in fact I was looking for it but forgot about archive.org.
Thanks :-)