Isn't that a bit cocky? "We, Ubuntu, the biggest most important distro out there, are doing away with the Notification tray, so if you want our millions of users to use it, you'd better get with it." What about the other distros? Are they going to have to follow suit after all the applications rewrite their code? I can understand this coming from Gnome, perhaps, but Ubuntu doesn't own Gnome. Why not have a wrapper for the notification area that turns it into a menu, for a last resort?
Agreed. Ubuntu is no less cocky than Apple. I see Ubuntu as the "Apple" of the Linux world. And they have to be cocky if they want to make any breakthroughs or any real innovations.
As another example, I have been running 10.04 beta for a while. At first I disagreed with their choice of moving all the window controls to the left, but now I am used it and actually like it better. I think it is more "efficient" as it usually minimizes my mouse movement. What is the point of this rambling? Ubuntu did something they thought was right, but wasn't popular initially. Eventually many people realized it is a better design choice. Apple (and GNOME in the Linux desktop world) have taken the same approach before. Sometimes it backfires but often it works well.
>I think it is more "efficient" as it usually minimizes my mouse movement.
Are you left handed? I tend to keep my cursor on the right presumably as an extension of the desktop metaphor - reaching across to the right means a far larger movement.
However, I can see theoretically that if you have your application launch button ("Start", "K" or what have you) on the left that you'd want to push other things that way. However I'd rather move the "pin" and "menu" buttons to the R of the menu bar.
I trust if KDE ever went that way they'd make it an option.
No. The reason it is more efficient is because the mouse pointer usually hovers more around the left and upper edges of the windows. That is where all the most frequent menus live are and most often used toolbar buttons. You can think of it as the logical origin of the window. For example the 'File->Save As..." menu, the "File->Close" menu, the "Back & Home" buttons on the browser and so on.
It would be an interesting HCI project to run a background statistics gatherer that would record mouse coordinates relative the window in focus.
The only time I usually move the mouse to right is to scroll (but I personally use the mouse wheel for scrolling) and resize the window. But most of the time it hovers on the left side.
Also, just because you hold the mouse in the right hand doesn't say anything where the cursor is on the screen. You would have to consider where the cursor already is when you want to close/minimize/maximize the window and how far you would have to "travel" with it.
Another 2 things to consider:
1) Mouse travel might seem like a very small change, but the action of closing a window is very frequent. So a small change multiplied many times can add to quite a bit.
2) This ends up working even better for laptops since a trackpad already offers a fairly small working surface compared to the surface available for a desktop mouse. The shorter the distance the cursor moves, the less trackpad "strokes" one has to perform.
>It would be an interesting HCI project to run a background statistics gatherer that would record mouse coordinates relative the window in focus.
It would indeed.
My mouse cursor definitely lives at teh right about 2/10 in from the right screen edge.
I do use shortcuts to access menus (as well as mouse, I'm fickle) but would see your comments as reasons to invert the menubar menu order and arrange them from the right rather than reason to move other stuff left.
But I'm probably an anomaly. In MS Windows (which I rarely use) my Vista install has the taskbar [vertically] on the right.
HN's reply button often annoys me because it is left aligned whilst as I'm a L-R text reader the proper position to me would be the right as on completion that is where my gaze falls.
KDE dialogs usually have Cancel/OK on right and help and other auxiliaries on the left. For example the systemsettings dialog has "apply" on the right, which inline with my above thinking seems the correct position.
Physical mouse travel for someone with all left-aligned action buttons could still be greater than someone using a "fast" mouse with action inputs spread across the screen.
Design by committee, and the "tread softly" model of UI design is why everyone else is so completely behind Apple on the UI front. I for one am glad that Ubuntu is taking a stand against it.
There was a link posted here a day or two ago about the secret to Apple's success - they don't do focus groups, they don't have big surveys about what will and won't work. They just do, and when you have capable, knowledgeable people at the helm people will get behind you.
I see this as the same thing.
> "Why not have a wrapper for the notification area that turns it into a menu, for a last resort?"
This doesn't work, it has never worked. Just look at Windows: "hey devs, we've deprecated this horrifying monstrosity that should never have seen the light of day. For the sake of compatibility we've preserved some functionality, but please switch over to the new better thing soon"
But what exactly does Apple do that disrupts the scene? It's their scene to disrupt, I don't really have the same problem with that. Ubuntu is just one distro, they don't own Gnome. Now developers are forced to pick sides. Maybe that's the main point I should have made.
Maybe I'm biased on this - but Linux has done nothing on the UI front for years. Even discounting gigantic embarrassments of programmer-UI like the Gimp, both Gnome and KDE have really, really bad UI. There's no consistency, nor intelligent design except perhaps "Windows is doing it, so it must be right".
Let's be honest, desktop Linux UI right now is really just a (bad) clone of Windows 2000.
So Gnome isn't going to fix their UI on their own - but yet that's what your users are interacting with every single day. I for one am glad that Ubuntu is fixing what the Gnome team has demonstrated for years that they cannot/will not.
Here's the way I see it: either we continue to sit and hope in vain that Gnome will step up and do something great with their UI... or somebody else takes charge at the cost of fracturing the community. For the sake of desktop Linux, I choose the latter.
That's ok. Mark Shuttleworth wants to be Jobs mk II. This is his text from the ubuntu bug report on removing the update notification from the notification area.
"But, we're not afraid of making bold moves. Ubuntu itself was a bold move, and has attracted a fair amount of criticism for its very existence, but that didn't stop us. If we want to transform the Linux desktop from where it is today, to something that Apple will feel obliged to emulate in parts, we are going to have to make bold moves and big changes, and those will cause distress. If we're right, the result will be fantastic, and the changes will be embraced by other distributions and upstream. If we're wrong, they won't."
Unfortunately many people get the feeling they're trying a lot of things without enough thought put into it - and when people report problems as bugs, Mark steps in and says no. They're simply becoming something like Apple of Linux world.
Well, maybe to backtrack a little, I don't have a problem with that Steve Jobs pioneering attitude. You can disrupt the market if you'd like. But to have that immediate effect on the developers of applications, making them change their UI fairly significantly just for Ubuntu, I don't think it's their place. If they really wanted to be bold like that, they should make the changes in the apps themselves.
Well I didn't say they didn't have every right to do it. I just think that it would be more considerate of them to negotiate with the other players. When I say that they don't "own" Gnome, I mean that they're not in change (yet, at least) of the Gnome ecosystem as a whole. Making a move like this is going to cause developers to have to pick sides between distros.
If they really want to fork Gnome, just be honest and say, "Gnome sucks, we're forking it and calling it "Gnomebuntu".
I can't imagine that you wouldn't be able to manually add the notification area. It probably just won't be enabled or installed by default. As a last resort, you can just enable it, but for developers who want their programs to be easy to use, they'll have to make sense for the many users who won't have notification areas.
