unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 11:09, Chad M/ Germann <cgermann@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> The problem is and you don't see it is your trying to cram a touch
> interface on a Desktop OS.
>

i think human computer interaction has some basic rules which apply to all
input devices that are pointer based.
all pointers are emulations of the human index finger, our natural human
pointing device.

we drag stuff with the whole hand, Minority Report was science fiction,
Kinect is Augmented Reality.

we hold stuff in our palm.

i could go on with this all day, but at the end of the day it's just an
ordinary physical modeling of certain actuation habits humans already have
onto the HCI framework of Free software.

As you stated before, the goal might be well placed in becoming more
"Unix-like" again.
But what exactly this means in 2011 is yet to be presented.
Concepts came, concepts were falsified, others improved and revisited, we
learn from mistakes and so does the collective collaborative effort.

I'm glad you put out your statement, it is a clear reminder that design,
philosophy and policy are equally important on this ML.


> Ubuntu will never see a Tablet or phone becuse it has too much in the
> way
>
> for example
>
> Power management Ubuntu is far from the best of the best distro for
> power usage. (my laptop gets 20 more minutes under fedora than it does
> under Ubuntu 11.10)
>
> Unity is a plug in for compiz. to fully understand the problem I invite
> you to do a little experiment. Play a video or game full screen in Unity
> than do the same in Gnome Shell than KDE, Note that the Frames per
> second slightly faster Mutter and even faster under Kwin. (and the gap
> between Mutter and Kwin is narrowing as Mutter matures) it this is
> notable on heavy Desktop hardware how is it going to be under mobile
> hardware. Hardware vendors are a panicky lot and are going to notice
> this and think "nobody is going to want a Tablet OS that cant play
> smooth full screen video or play Angry Birds with."
>
> Now to break and go on a tangent for a moment I am going to state this
> on the record. And i will stake  my reputation as a Computer Scientist
> on the following statement. the OS that continues to build a system
> designed around a rich desktop client model will be flooded with users
> within five years.
>
> You may be thinking Why do I say this? Simple think back 10 years or so
> and the big Industry fad at the time was thin clients. At the time, they
> seemed like a good idea move applications and the heavy computational
> lifting to the server room and pipe it to the end users desktop to cheep
> Dumb terminals  and save a bundle in IT costs from hardware pricing and
> support.
>
> Quickly problems arose as corporate intranets (I find it funny that term
> is so old that is is not in the spell checker)  were breached. and
> Productivity slowed downs as applications moved as the crawl that
> 100baseT and Intranet connections could serve them. it was a failure and
> not long afterwards shiny Full blooded desktops replaced the thin
> clients.
>
> Now we have this "cloud" (are they nimbostratus or stratocunulus?) fad
> and Everyone wants to build for it with there trendy "Post PC"
> Interfaces to support it. Gnome, Unity and to a marginal extent KDE want
> to get on the cool kids train
>
> Lets look forward to 5 years from now (and I am being optimistic) when
> End users figure out that "Cloud Computing" is the return of the thin
> client only worse as there stuff is being stored further away and
> attached to a even more public and insecure network that is slowed down
> by massive amounts of traffic and the effects of "activists" and
> disgruntled users. A mass exodus will occure back to rich desktop
> clients and at that time the system that can conjure up the most
> compelling Traditional WIMP Desktop interface will win.
>
>
>
> Now ato addres your "Rebukes"
>
> >         On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 11:50, Chad M/ Germann
> >         <cgermann@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >         > On Tue, 2011-11-29 at 12:52
> >         +0100, frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> >         >> how do you define Unix-like in 2011?
> >         >
> >         > In a nutshell Keep it Simple, Stupid.
> >         >
> >         > to expand.
> >         >
> >         >  1. Small is beautiful.
> >
> >
> >
> > beautiful is mostly also useful, but not always usable.
> >
> Small has a History of being more userfrendly than large and convaluted.
>
> >         >     2. Make each program do one thing well.
> >
> >
> >
> > true, ..and name it after that thing, too, so that the user can
> > identify the purpose rather than the manufacturer.
> >
> >         [...]
> >         >     9. Make every program a filter
> >
> >
> > hot, interesting! i think this might be the idea behind lenses and
> > prisms.
>
> lenses and prisms are not Filters as you can't pipe the output into
> other programs to further analyze the output grep is a filter lenses are
> not
>
>
>
> >         >    15. Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in
> >         preference to
> >         >        machine time
> >
> >
> >
> > what about user time? How expensive is that?
>
> Non Sequitur question considering that the Quote was about Machine time
> but, to corporate world a user's time is cheep compared to an engineer's
> time as the engineer pulls a bigger paycheck and also Designs the
> product.
>
> But yes the Time of the creative person is a more valuable commodity. as
> they can spend that time creating.
>
>
>