
Single menu bar for Ubuntu - danh
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/359
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lincolnq
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.

~~~
xtho
I personally wish they would go and buy a Mac and leave the desktop as it is.

~~~
tuxychandru
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?

~~~
xtho
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.

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rimantas
There's nothing ridiculous in Fitts' law.

~~~
xtho
It is for notebook (incl. netbook) users who hardly ever use the
mouse/trackpad.

~~~
maggit
Just for reference, so we can all agree on what consitutes Fitts's law:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts_law>

\----

"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.

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samratjp
Shuttleworth did a great job on the article, but I am disappointed that
something of this GUI nature wasn't supplemented with some screenshots.

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netghost
Personally I'd like it for the desktop too. I've grown quite accustomed to
MacOSX's menubar.

~~~
vaporstun
It would be nice to at least have the option on the desktop, even if it is not
the default.

~~~
etal
KDE has had the option of a global menu bar for awhile:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_Global_menu.png>

It's not very consistent across applications, though. Hopefully Ubuntu's work
here will also help more applications work with other implementations of it.

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leif
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.

~~~
blasdel
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.

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cgranade
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.

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pkulak
Are there any renderings of what he's describing here?

~~~
wmf
(I'm barely resisting the urge to post an OS X screen shot.)

It's like <http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/> but modified to
normally display the window title and only display menus on mouseover (hello
discoverability).

~~~
rbanffy
A screenshot of a Lisa would do nicely too.

I am happy this is only for the netbook version. It's a usability nightmare
when you have a 30" monitor (or a couple big ones).

Actually, with two monitors, OSX becomes pretty disorienting.

~~~
tensor
I do not find this to be true at all. But to each his own.

~~~
rbanffy
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?

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windsurfer
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.

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DavidSJ
_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.

~~~
tome
Fitt's Law does not say edge elements are close to the mouse. It says edge
elements are large.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law>

~~~
DavidSJ
By "in the relevant respect", I meant "in time".

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Zak
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.

~~~
defenestrator
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)

~~~
Zak
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.

~~~
defenestrator
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. =)

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crux_
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...

~~~
nailer
Pretty sure it was working about two or three years ago. Someone made patched
for GNOME that were rejected by mainline.

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slmbrhrt
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.

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motters
In principle this sounds like a good idea if preservation of vertical screen
realestate is a priority.

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aidenn0
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.

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jsz0
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.

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sampo
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.

~~~
kylec
It's hard to read vertical text

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hackermom
Step by step Shuttleworth moves the Ubuntu UI to in one way after the other be
like OS X' Aqua. A good move in my opinion.

