

Unity: a lightweight netbook interface for Ubuntu - audidude
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/383

======
drats
<http://www.canonical.com/products/unity>

If it's all about speed and lightness they might want to drop firefox for
chrome. The difference is very noticeable on an Atom 1.6gighz, and in the
upcoming ARM powered devices it will be too.

~~~
randallsquared
The screenshot ( [http://www.markshuttleworth.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/05/L...](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/05/LightScreenshot.png) ) does use Chromium. What I find
remarkable about this "light" version of Ubuntu, though, is that it seems to
use up more screen real estate for panels than normal Ubuntu! What the hell?

~~~
Legion
The left panel has "this should auto-hide" written all over it.

As a Ubuntu Netbook Remix user, though, I'm looking at the window titlebar and
wondering, what happened to the titlebar-integrates-into-top-panel stuff from
UNR? Shouldn't that remain a part of the "conserving precious vertical display
space" approach?

~~~
CUViper
The integrated panel+toolbar doesn't really fit with the "windicators" idea,
so I wouldn't be surprised to see that integration go away.

------
potatolicious
I love it - it's about damned time that the open source community started
giving a real shit about UI.

~~~
weego
I think they always have done at a certain level, but of course good
developers do not make good "joe average" users, and the open source movement
has really always been about programmers, not graphic designers/UX/IA people.
That's always where companies have added the real value when they build off
open source imo. While I admire what people like KDE and Gnome do in terms of
effort, the results they return have always been questionable.

~~~
jteo
UI development is not a democratic process.

~~~
thmz
Why not? I think it is and should be.

When 90% of your end users are old people who rarely use a computer you have
to ask them about there needs. You will collect the 'votes' and may discover
you have to drop some functionalities. And maybe a slider UI will be better
than a number ticker/spinner control.

~~~
geocar
> Why not?

Because users are dumb.

I watch them make bad decisions _all the time_ ; they want to put a box of 60
categories _here_ in the left nav of the page; they want to have a drop-down
menu for every department in the hospital. "Asking" ten users how a user-
interface should work, and you'll get ten incompatible and stupid answers.

The trick to using users to get good UI is to have a programmer _watch them_
try a prototype (or using paper prototypes). Of course, the programmer has to
be tied to a chair and have his mouth duct-tape'd closed so he doesn't try and
help, but the fact is when he sees the "inputs", he'll optimize the layout
correctly to suit them. Programmers make fine user-interface designers when
they're properly motivated.

~~~
thmz
You shouldn't ask users how the UI should be. You have to listen to there
needs. Then you have to translate this 'democratic' information into a UI
design.

When a user wants a drop-down for every department in the hospital you could
translate this into "I want to select a department as easy and quickly as
possible".

~~~
cakeface
Listening to someones needs and then deciding what is best for them is not
democratic at all. I think that you are really stretching here.

------
ash
It's instructive to compare this with Windows 7 (often comes installed on
modern netbooks). Recipe: 1. move default taskbar to the left and 2. use
Chrome. The result is pretty good, I think:

<http://drop.io/dyhgfkv/asset/windows7-png>

------
audidude
deb <http://ppa.launchpad.net/canonical-dx-team/une/ubuntu> lucid main

deb-src <http://ppa.launchpad.net/canonical-dx-team/une/ubuntu> lucid main

apt-get install unity

unity --show

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
`add-apt-repository ppa:canonical-dx-team/une` will add both the apt sources
and the signing key in a single command.

------
riobard
It's funny that they are talking about maximizing the vertical pixels while
letting title bar, menu bar, url bar, bookmark bar, tab bar, horizontal scroll
bar, and status bar eating up 1/3 of vertical pixels of the primary web
browser window on the home page photo at
<[http://www.canonical.com/products/unity>](http://www.canonical.com/products/unity>).

Seriously, Open Source marketing should be improved in this level of detail.
Yes netbooks have shallow screens, then why wasting 145 precious vertical
pixels to show non-content controls on a web browser window only 428 pixels
high?

Some naive ways to improve the impression:

* Make the browser window taller, preferably taking all available vertical space. Present more web content when you really want to improve the web experience. (Right now I can only see the big heading of NYT, not really interesting.)

* Bundle one of those Hide Menu plugin to kill menu bar. How often do you really need it? And when you do need it, just click one button on the url bar to summon it.

* Choose a page that is slightly narrower or widen the window a little bit (you have the horizontal pixels to waste!) so horizontal scroll does not show up.

* Hide the status bar. Most users don't look at it anyway.

* If there is only one tab, don't show the tab bar.

Or better yet, replacing Firefox with Chrome solves it once and for all.

~~~
drblast
On my netbook with Ubuntu I wanted to move the top gnome panel to the right
side so I'd have more vertical space; apparently this is impossible to do
cleanly.

We have wide screens now, and a lack of vertical space. The solution seems
obvious to me; don't take up vertical space with desktop UI and move it to the
side instead.

I love the gnome-shell, but I'd love it more if I could get those top pixels
back. On a netbook, every little bit counts.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
>On my netbook with Ubuntu I wanted to move the top gnome panel to the right
side so I'd have more vertical space; apparently this is impossible to do
cleanly.

I tried this with the past four versions of Ubuntu (8.10, 9.04, 9.10 and
10.04) on my Aspire One. In the first three cases I went back to a top or
bottom panel because the side panel was ugly and unusable. With 10.04, a
right-side panel is actually decent for the first time. It's not _great_ \-
e.g. the shutdown applet is still too wide and doesn't flip vertically - but
it's decent.

------
ivenkys
"It’s about how fast you have a running system that is responsive to the needs
of the user." - This is the key.

Make it look nice with excellent fonts and i am sold. I know this is not
designed for a workstation - but for standard browsing, checking emails and
general usage , this could be it.

------
AngryParsley
Dock on the left, title bar and sys tray at the top, window controls on the
left side... this vaguely reminds me of some other OS, and I don't think
that's at all a bad thing. People like OS X's UI. It makes sense to go with
what works.

If they wanted to save more vertical screen real estate, Ubuntu could take
another hint from Apple and enable Global Menu Bar by default (
<http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/> )

~~~
dchest
They are doing this. "Third, we will make the top panel smarter. We’ve already
talked about adopting a single global menu, which would be rendered by the
panel in this case."

See also <http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/359>

------
jacquesm
Does anybody that has used both have an idea of how this compares to the
Ubuntu Notebook Remix default UI?

I've been using it on a small acer netbook with a 3G card in it and it has
worked pretty well in that configuration for me, I'm curious how they compare
but I'm loathe to install stuff on it without some idea of what I'm getting in
to because it is a machine I rely on in emergencies (on the road, server
down).

------
lh
Looking at that Ubuntu Light example image, they could still move the window
title and buttons to bar at the top, next to the search field, to save more
vertical space. In the other hand, if they want to make it more usable for
touch users, they'll need to enlarge the main toolbar and all those tiny
indicators (battery, volume etc.) at the lost of some vertical space.

~~~
emilis_info
Yes, the top of that screenshot looks messy. If they are moving in this
direction, they could also get rid of the top panel. Or at least redesign it.

I have been working in a similar desktop on my wide-screen laptop for nearly a
year now. I feel much more productive. It took me some time and skills to
configure it, but the tools are already available. I use Openbox+Tint2+Conky
and some other lightweight utilities. Also Tree Style Tab extension for
Firefox: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890> Since they are
talking about getting users to the browser faster, they may as well tweak the
browser to work better in this environment.

It is more natural when window/tab hierarchy flows from left to right, than
from left and then from top.

------
corruption
I love it, however there are still a few things off.

1) The gradient on the window titlebar is too pronounced and isn't consistent
with the left sidebar.

2) Fonts don't look awesome - they are okay though. Please just license or
create a truly great font!

3) Icons on the sidebar don't look right. I'd rather no background personally.

~~~
audidude
fonts get insanely better for my systems the moment i turn on full hinting.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
To get the fonts I like (Mac OS X style) I turn hinting off completely. Ubuntu
seems to be moving closer to this as the default as time goes by, probably a
smart move as there will be less and less people used to old-skool Windows
font rendering.

~~~
sid0
"Old-skool"? Does Mac OS X do sub-pixel positioning yet?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Yes, the released it in Mac OS X 10.2, one year after Windows XP had
cleartype, but they didn't hide the feature away so that only experts could
find it and so it was widely used.

But, sub-pixel rendering is just a diversion from the real differences between
the two systems, one fits to the grid via hints, the other anti-aliases. I
believe both iPhone and Windows Phone are now using this system, and without
bothering with sub-pixel rendering.

~~~
sid0
I didn't say sub-pixel _rendering_. I said sub-pixel _positioning_. Can
characters be placed at sub-pixel boundaries instead of whole-pixel ones?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Sorry I misread that. But I'm fairly certain that Apple's method positioned
text to less than a pixel anyway, just as a side effect of their general
method. It's the Microsoft school of type rendering that tries to grid fit and
therefore is excited about having a finer grid of (sub-)pixels to fit to.

I can't Google up a definitive answer but this document comparing Adobe type
rendering against Cleartype seems to suggest that what I say above is true.

 _Microsoft and Adobe: Sub-pixel Positioning and Kerning_ :

<http://antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/#toc0003>

~~~
sid0
Yes, but where does it say Apple does sub-pixel positioning? From what I
remember last time I checked, I'm 99% sure it doesn't.

My overall point is that calling ClearType "old-skool" is an injustice when
it's more technically advanced than Apple's rendering.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
It's fairly obvious that Apple use the same basic system as Adobe. This
renders text on a grid that is far higher resolution than the screen then
resamples it down. Anything that doesn't round to a pixel is pretty much by
definition sub-pixel, and the colour fringes you see when zoomed in clearly
show that they're using the individual sub-pixels independantly. I'm not
really sure how you could achieve this without what Microsoft call "sub-pixel
positioning". It only appears to be a _feature_ with a distinct name because
they left it out in their first few versions of cleartype.

Old-skool referred to a) the fact that it's subjectively more pleasing to
those who are used to aliased, bitmap fonts hence the big demand for
"terminal" or programmer fonts in that style, even today and b) the fact the
rising DPIs have been on the cards for a long time and are now arriving,
making cleartype technology, and the aesthetic philosophy behind it, basically
redundant.

I don't really believe it's more technically advanced, just a different style
of rendering that worked with a different set of technological and user-
defined constraints.

(For what it's worth, when I looked up what sub-pixel positioning was, it was
listed next to Y-axis anti-aliasing with equal billing. Again this is just
built into the Adobe and Apple approach from the start:
[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ms749295.aspx#y-dire...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ms749295.aspx#y-direction_antialiasing))

~~~
sid0
> and the colour fringes you see when zoomed in clearly show that they're
> using the individual sub-pixels independantly

Seems like you're still missing the point. You'll see the colour fringes with
ClearType too. Here's a test:

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Do all of those render identically on Mac OS X, or are the colour fringes
different for different i's? They render differently on Windows with
DirectWrite. If they render differently then you know you support sub-pixel
positioning. (I can't claim the inverse, of course.)

> b) the fact the rising DPIs have been on the cards for a long time and are
> now arriving, making cleartype technology, and the aesthetic philosophy
> behind it, basically redundant.

How is this so? As DPI goes to infinity, both ClearType and Quartz will look
exactly like they would look in print.

------
tdoggette
Now that I've acclimated to Chrome on Windows, I don't think I could give up
having the tabs on the very top of the screen. Me and my man Fitts love having
the browser tabs at the top and the open applications at the bottom. It's
really fast to switch tabs using the mouse that way.

------
Legion
"Unity is available now for testing on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS"
(<http://www.canonical.com/products/unity>)

Oh hell. Now I have to run out to my pickup and grab my netbook. There goes a
productive morning.

------
jasonlbaptiste
curious to hear thoughts on this vs chromeos

