 Ubuntu version 11.4 is due to be released sometime at the end of this month, and I'm going to hear as quickly as I can walk through the new Unity interface and point out all the mostly small things that I think need to change before it gets released or hopefully at least soon after it gets released. So here's a screenshot of Unity running from a build I think dated April 6th. So this is very recent. The windowing theme, that is the general look of the fonts and the borders around the windows is basically unchanged since 10.10. And also what you see in the top right, all of those panel icons are basically unchanged since 10.10. But what's new here quite obviously is the big new launcher on the left, which is actually now supplanted both the old window switcher that would go at the bottom of the screen and also the applications places system menu that used to sit in the top left. Aside from the new launcher, the other major change is that application menus, the traditional file edit application menu no longer appears on each individual window. You select an active window and then it appears in the top bar, pretty much just like in Mac OS X. I'm going to talk about that later. First though, I want to focus on just the launcher. So the striking thing about the launcher is that it makes Ubuntu now very much like Windows 7 with its new taskbar that itself imitated the Mac OS X style dock. Though actually I personally prefer the Windows 7 style to the Mac OS X dock. So in general, I'm quite pleased with this change. And in fact, on my own Windows 7 system, when I run Windows 7, I always place the taskbar on the left side. So this is very familiar to me. In fact, if you were to take all those panel icons in the top right and place them down at the bottom of the launcher, the taskbar, just like in Windows 7, and you got rid of that top bar entirely, what you'd end up with is something that looks and acts virtually just like Windows 7. In fact, I can kind of just sum up everything by saying that's actually what I think they should do. They should just take those few extra steps and go all the way and make this pretty much just like Windows 7. And as I'll go over, most of the ways in which this diverges from Windows 7 is for the most part inferior. And I wonder if the Unity team is willing to acknowledge how close this is to Windows 7 and if they're just resisting going that last mile just because of not invented here syndrome basically. So the first big mistake with the launcher is that the launcher has this odd auto hide behavior. That's very confusing. By default, the launcher will only appear if there's no window overlapping that same area it occupies. So if I were to drag this Firefox window to the left such that it overlaps the launcher, the launcher would then hide itself. And then the only way I could get the launcher back is by moving the window away or by moving the mouse into the top left corner and that exposes the launcher until I move the mouse out into the right and then it'll auto hide again after a short time. This is frankly really confusing. And in fact, when you maximize a window, maximized windows are considered to overlap that area. So any time you have a maximized window, the only time you see the launcher is if you move the mouse up into the top left corner. To make things even more confusing, currently this may be a bug and it may be something they will fix in a few weeks. But currently, as you move your mouse over the Ubuntu logo in the top left and as you inch towards the left corner, the menu will start peeking out each pixel you move towards the left corner. The launcher will peek out just another pixel. But you have to go all the way into the top left corner before the launcher is fully exposed. If you move the mouse away as it starts peeking out, it's considered not exposed and it'll just hide immediately as you move the mouse down to try and click on something. That's really frustrating and weird. So at the very least they need to fix that. Also this is simply confusing because for a long time I couldn't tell if I was supposed to click that Ubuntu button in the top left and actually you're not supposed to because clicking that Ubuntu button, that's actually the equivalent of the start menu in Windows. You click that and it exposes the start menu, as we'll discuss in a minute. So right off the bat with Unity you get confused because the launcher is exhibiting this very weird auto-hide behavior. Many people have suggested that the launcher should be exposed not just by mousing into the top left corner but also just anywhere on the left edge. And that would be a help. But I would go even further and say just by default absolutely what should happen by the time Ubuntu gets released, that launcher should just always be visible. It shouldn't have any auto-hide behavior. If some users prefer that for whatever reason, maybe just for aesthetic reasons or they have a small screen, like on a netbook thingy, well that should be something they should have to configure. But by default it absolutely should be just always visible. Right now in fact in the standard configuration menu there is no option to always expose the launcher, however there's a program for configuring comp is that you can install that you can use to configure Unity and have that always be fixed in place. Another oddity with the launcher is what they did to cope with the problem of scale where when you open too many programs then therefore they no longer all fit in the space. What they do is pretty clever. You'll see when you have too many icons that the excess icons get displayed sort of skewed three-dimensionally such that they're tilted back and they get stacked at the bottom and you mouse over that stack and it expands and you can click on them. That's pretty clever. It has a few problems. For one, when you hover over the thing at the bottom you expect them all to expand such that you can see the bottom most but the way they have it expand it expands such that it expands downwards rather than upwards and so you have to then scroll the whole list by clicking and dragging the launcher and you can click and drag up and down to move the row of icons to drag it up and down. A weird thing about this solution though is that you can actually click and drag to slide the icons of the launcher up and down at any time like say here in the screenshot even though I don't have an excess number of icons there I can still slide them up and down for no effect basically. You slide them up and then you let go and they just spring back into place. It's kind of weird. For a long time I was wondering what the hell is that for? It turns out the reason it does that is because if you want to rearrange the order of the icons like you can in the Windows 7 taskbar to do that you have to click and drag an icon outwards that is to the right and then find a position for it and drop it back into place. Then also see that trash can down at the bottom that's always in that fixed space there you click that and obviously it opens your recycling bin your trash can but also that's the only way you can delete these well you can delete them by right clicking and effectively unpinning them from the launcher or you can drag them out and then drag them onto that trash can. Quick aside I think that trash can is kind of silly I just don't think people need to look at their trash can that frequently that the trash can necessitates a privileged position on the launcher. That's kind of weird to me. Yeah in any case the solution they have for scaling in the case of access icons it's not terrible and actually I'd say it's probably better than what they have in Windows 7 and Windows 7 when you have too many icons you then have a little arrows down at the bottom that you effectively flip through pages of icons on the taskbar and that's no good because it's modal. I seriously wonder if the best solution to this problem of access icons is just to have a special icon down at the bottom which you click that expands out effectively a second row temporarily and although their current design is probably just fine maybe all I would do is that when you do slide it up and down they just always display a little message down somewhere a little overlay somewhere that telling you what the hell is happening because it's a bit hard to figure out just some sort of floating overlay with a message and a checkbox that you can uncheck so that it doesn't show up again. Well actually there is one way I would change the launcher and that is I would simply take those panel icons on the top right and put them down at the bottom of the launcher just like in the Windows 7 taskbar effectively a notification area with a time and date displayed so that we can simply get rid of that top bar because as I'll get into that top bar really just should disappear basically it shouldn't be there right now though let's look at the start menu or what they call the dash I guess is in like dashboard so on your keyboard you hit the windows key or what they call the super key or you click on the Ubuntu icon in the top left and this is what you'll see in basic concept it's very similar to the start menu as it was introduced in Windows Vista with the search box that you can type in that I really love but I have to say I really don't have too much to complain about here I think they did a very nice job in particular it's smart how they put the search box at the top whereas in Windows Vista if you place the taskbar on the left side of the screen and you open the start menu then the the search box appears down at the bottom and that's not a good place for it in that orientation so it's I like having it up here top and also I really like how they realize you know the start menu why does it have to be small doesn't have to be small doesn't have to hide in its corner of the screen we can just make it big and so they had very generous mousing targets here and they very smartly have whittled this down to very few selection choices which is good especially for novice users I'm not so sure exactly what's going on with those four icons on the bottom how are those selected they're not the most recent programs they seem to just be like four of the most common tasks I guess as they determined by user testing perhaps I don't know if those things can be customized they don't really bother me I just find it a bit odd one thing I do not like here though is the little thing that says shortcuts with the home icon next to it and the down arrow what that does is if you click that it toggles the dash menu here such that all of those eight big icons effectively that area disappears so you can hide or reveal that area that's what clicking that shortcuts thing does I would just get rid of that entirely but if you're going to keep it you need to change that icon because just just make it that damn little arrow because calling it shortcuts that's just weird what does that mean those are shortcuts I don't think so it's just confusing semantically what what that's supposed to convey and I have no idea why there's that home icon that's confusing because it suggests something to do with your home folder but it has nothing to do with that so I don't know what's going on there I also don't really like in the bottom right of the dash you'll see there's a little white window like icon you can click and that'll expand the dash so that fills up the whole screen I guess it's pretty harmless and you can just ignore it if you don't want to use it but I just find it weird for one when you click that thing it's going to make the icon sort of resort as you know that what happens with icons when you're laid them out in two dimensions as soon as you resize the area then they have to get resorted and I think that's always confusing but in general just kind of averse to the idea that we should always make things resizable because I think you know you should have the system intelligently fit things to the space such that the designer has to decide how big something needs to be I guess I should be grateful that this expansion button is actually toggled you don't drag out the dash to resize it you just click it and it expands to the full size so that at least I'm grateful for again not a big deal but it just kind of bugs me this actually reminds me about one more thing I don't like about the launcher and that is that see the more apps and find files icons here those icons actually appear at the bottom of the program list on the launcher and they're always fixed there you can't remove them I don't see any point in this if expert users need a really quick way to get at these icons and they don't want to have to open the dash and then click one of these two then just make the music keyboard shortcut you know adding just something they can click on the launchers weird and also just I think a bit confusing to new users of why are these things but why do you have these special cases here on the launcher special cases like this always require I think a great deal of justification and I just don't see it here I mean it's right there in the dash so how much trouble could people have clicking twice rather than once and while we're at it actually there's one more thing here in the launcher which I think needs to go at least by default and that's third from the bottom not including the trash can third from the bottom is the icon for the workspace switcher when you click that icon your whole desktop zooms backwards as if like you're zooming out from it and you see your other workspaces which you can switch to it's pretty much the window switching just like you've seen in comp is in the last four years and it's quite well done you can drag windows in this view you can drag them from one workspace to the other so it's nice for organizing but I say this not just as person who you know uses a computer very heavily and doesn't use workspaces and really doesn't like them I say this is someone who tries to teach computers basic computer users to novice users and people without a lot of experience I think just having workspaces available by default is just a really really terrible idea you don't want to put that button there so that people who don't know what they're doing are going to accidentally click it and they're gonna be wondering what the fuck is going on there's just no reason this needs to be there by default people want to use it fine just make it an option put it in the program menu you can simply add it to the task by yourself but otherwise there's no reason it needs to be there there are plenty of people who have used computers for years and they successfully use a web browser and they still don't understand the concept of I open a web browser program and inside that program I have my tabs and those tabs display web pages they don't understand that concept and you want to add a third level that says okay my programs are in windows and those windows exist in workspaces so you have your web pages in your tabs your tabs in your web browser windows your web browser windows in a workspace that's what you want to do that's that's crazy and aside from a whole comprehension issue I think it just most people just don't like using workspaces or they just don't have any need to do so because they have very few windows open and they're just not in the habit of that workflow and in the case getting back to the dash when you click on the find apps button for example this is what you see you see three rows at the top they're frequently used programs and in the middle installed programs and then at the bottom apps available for download again I generally like this I like how everything's nice and big and very readable and well spaced I'm not so sure about making the available for download apps so prominent I think maybe you need to separate them visually somehow the objection here is that for most computer users their experiences they're overwhelmed by all the options that already exist on their systems and say all the files and folders they already have all the programs they already have that's you know trying to throw more stuff at them just makes them less happy but another reason to object here is that while the software repositories the Ubuntu store and Synaptic there they're all they're getting a lot better and they're more friendly than they were just a few years ago but there you still see in this list you still see a whole bunch of apps that you know most people have no idea what the hell they're for I mean there's no description given there and in the long tradition of Unix a lot of these programs you see have crappy names that are totally meaningless to most people with funny spellings and extra letters tapped on tacked on the front why did all these things have Ks and Gs in front so I prefer it if by default there were at least some very restrictive filtering of these suggested apps you know filter it down to a selection of apps that have been shown to be actually desired by casual users and you know you can have an option for advanced users that they want to see more suggestions perhaps but but just in the spirit of getting rid of clutter and hiding unfriendly things that are meaningless to most users hiding that stuff out of their sight I think that bottom bar down there needs a needs a second thought another thing I don't like here is that you have to click next to installed you have to click C 74 more results to see the full list of applications I'd rather they just take that middle section and fully expand it so such that this dash would then take up the whole height of the screen and you just have that middle section which you can scroll through you would probably just leave the frequently used icons at the top as is though maybe just take that expansion button and make it a bigger full-sized icon off on the right side I just think that expansion button needs to be a bigger target and it just makes more sense to me on the right side of the list at the end of the list oh and one last thing here where it says all applications in the top right that's a pulldown menu you click and you select a filter on what applications you see like say you can select the category of games and we're seeing right now the default all applications category I like what they do better in gnom3 we're instead of a pulldown menu they have that just off to the side as just a list written out it seems more obvious it's kind of hidden up there it's not so obvious it's a button if you want to keep that pulldown just make it more obvious it's a button and make it maybe a bit or a little bit bigger as a mousing target also when you open it up the the items in the list are just a bit too small they need to be bigger I think the reason they have it is this pulldown rather than use the gnom3 style is because they're trying to target unity also forum small devices like netbooks and possibly touch touchscreen devices like tablets so they stuff all those categories into this pulldown in the dash so that the dash can fit in smaller spaces I would say if that's really necessary well then just have two options on the desktop version though you should have it as a list like in gnom3 okay we finally now get to the biggest problem area in unity which is the top bar and how unity tries to give applications a global menu bar in the style of macOS so here we can see I have this folder window open my home folder and I've maximized it but notice how when maximized the title bar of your maximize window becomes effectively the top bar of the screen where the panel icons go so that top bar and your title bar get merged into one you also notice here that we don't see any traditional menu bar you don't see file edit anywhere to get at the menu bar what you do is you have your mouse over the title of the window and it then changes into the menu bar the first thing I don't like about this is that especially someone who is very fidgety with a mouse I tend to just move the mouse cursor around when I'm not exactly sure what I'm about to do next I don't like how when I'm fidgety with the mouse and the curses on the top left how I'll constantly see the title bar and the menu flash in and out flashback and forth it's simply distracting and as we'll see in some cases it's just confusing the next problem with this whole arrangement where the title bar of a maximize window gets integrated into that top bar is notice what happens here we have a maximize Firefox window but no window currently has focus so we don't have an active window now what do we see well we don't even see the title of that window of the Firefox window nor do we even see its close minimize and maximize buttons so this means to close and maximize window you have to make it active first then you'll see the x which you can click worst of all when I have a window active which is not maximized did I have another maximize window what I will see in the title bar is the title for that active window not for the maximize window so very confusingly it looks like home folder should be the title of the Firefox window the maximize window but it's not and now here when I mouse over the title in the top bar I see a menu bar but it's not the menu bar for the maximize window it's the menu bar for my active window which is the the folder window here you'll also notice one oddity here though I doubt this is deliberate design it's probably just some bug or something that's going to get fixed by release notice how the menu bar is weirdly overlaid part of the title they see still see part of the title poking through this is not only ugly it's really quite confusing it took me a while to figure out what the hell was going on in this whole scheme so the essence of the problem here is that they've taken the macOS 10 style global menu bar for all applications for all windows at the top but at the same time the designers have decided to be clever and integrate the title bar of the maximized window into that top bar where the menu goes so you have this very ugly and weird behavior we have to mouse over the title to see the current menu bar for the currently active window now the solution I prefer here and I think this is a preference of a lot of people is I wish they would just ditch any attempt at having a global application menu and they could keep them the integration of the maximized title bar into the top bar that would be fine then so actually my preferred preferred solution is to get rid of that top bar entirely and then integrate all the the panel stuff into the launcher at the bottom just like the windows 7 notification area slash system trade but assuming they're not willing to use either of those solutions and what they needed that the very least to do is just ditches full concept of integrating the title bar into the top bar you can't have the global application menu and this integrated title bar business going on at the same time they just make things too weird you get that ugly flash we have to hover over the title and it's just a the other thing they need to do with these title bars regardless of all that is that all the windows and the title bar at the top where the menu goes there needs to be an icon for the application they really need to bring those back if you look at gnom3 it looks very nice how they have the icon integrated into the title bar oh I actually did have a third solution to this problem and that is that you would have the title of the window become a button and when you click this title then the menu bar expands out as an overlay beneath it it would actually look very much like what you see in Firefox 4 you see in Firefox 4 the title is something you can click and you see a menu that pops out if you did that then you actually could get away with an arrangement where the menu bar for the active window always appears in the top bar you'd have in the top left the title for whatever is maximized but then somewhere centered in a big button you'd have the the button for the menu bar of the active window so you can actually have two menu bars up there at once if you have the if you use these title buttons well actually here I just made a quick crude mock-up of what this would look like you'd have the Firefox button there in the top left because that's the maximized window and then you have the the home folder that is the active folder window there in the middle somewhere and you probably make that one considerably bigger because I think kind of what they're trying to do by putting the menu bar at the top is to make it a nice easy mousing target so you're going to store your mouse up to the top and easily hit the menu yes you'd have the title button slash menu button somewhere in the center there and considerably wider than what you see here so it's a nice big target oh and actually not seen here with this arrangement you can add back in the close button and the minimize button next to the maximize windows title button slash menu bar so I think that's actually a pretty neat solution though I'd really just go for ditching the whole top bar in the first place okay now just a few more gripes quickly one minor thing is I don't like how when you mount any drive they those drives automatically appear as icons in the launcher I think just like with a trash can that you can just leave that up to people finding in the file browser I sort of understand the motivation because by default they put this home icon in the top so you only have by default the one link to folders but then you know you open the dash and right there there's a link to find folders so why not just having that find folders you know add any mounted drives or just let people go to the file browser and simply look forward in the list now also notice what happens here when these two mounted drives is they appear on my desktop and that leads to actually when my biggest gripes is I think unity just like a num3 needs to get rid of the desktop the whole notion of the desktop as this quick access special directory I think this is the long-standing dumbest idea in interface design for 20 years it's really something we should have ditched at least 10 years ago it's just a dumb dumb idea expert users know it's just a bad way of organizing stuff and it's an inconvenient place to get at so it's not really a convenient place to put things or to access things novice users are simply confused by it and intermediate users this is actually the biggest crime of all intermediate users have because of the desktop have no conception of what the fuck is going on with files and folders it's one of the biggest obstacles especially as implemented in Windows it's one of the biggest obstacles to understanding what the hell is going on because what does the desktop mean it means that you have this thing which is really a directory on which appears your computer the bicomputer icon and other stuff but your computer contains storage drives which contains ultimately the desktop directory itself so the desktop is this weird twisted mobius strip that contains itself and so is it any surprise that most users even those who've used computers for years and years have no concept of how folders and files work the desktop deliberately obfuscates the whole concept and it's a convenience which is not convenient it's it's just a really terrible awful thing so hopefully now that GNOME 3 has finally made the leap unity after a while will catch on and make the same decision we'll see how this goes so like GNOME 3 unity should get rid of the desktop and also like GNOME 3 the last last thing I'll mention unity should at least by default get rid of minimization now I'm not saying that I myself never minimize things I'm saying that I shouldn't be tempted by the option because it's never the right way of going about things the reason I tend to minimize windows is because I want to get at the window behind whatever I have typically maximized but that's done we have a mechanism for switching between windows it's called the taskbar or the launcher here and you should just have one damn mechanism that fits all of your cases or alt tabbing we'll we have a keyboard method for switching between windows as well and you know moving windows out of the way to get at the things underneath the thing is just this ridiculous burden of meta work that just gets in the way of our thought process so if we get rid of minimization very quickly I think users will train themselves to not want it anymore and they'll just reflectively always go to the same place the the launcher on the left to switch between their windows or if they're using the keyboard they'll use alt tab now actually if I had my way and this is a whole other screencast if I had my way all windows would always be maximized with no option to de-maximize windows basically you wouldn't have any free-floating windows it sounds crazy and unworkable it has issues of well wait a minute what about applications that have little windows and what happens there but again that's a whole other discussion and I realize that's not an argument I'm going to win anytime soon