 In this video, I'm going to talk about Ubuntu's new interface called Unity, which is forthcoming in the next release. And it has three major features I'll discuss. First over here on the left is what they call the launcher, which is effectively like the dock or the taskbar, and they have what they call the dash, which is effectively their version of the start menu. And I'll also talk about what they've done with application menus. So first, looking at the launcher, you have the icons here very much like in say the dock or the taskbar. And this little triangle here is indicating which of these applications are open. And this triangle on the right is indicating was my currently active application, and these windows by the way are on my other screen. And all these other buttons like these two indicate an application which has been pinned here, but which isn't currently open. And so if I click here on LibreOfficeWriter, notice the nice fade-in, fade-out effect, and then it appears. Okay, so the first odd thing going on with the launcher, what's unique in Unity is that here if I move this window such that it overlaps with the launcher, the launcher dodges out of the way. And you see the same thing when you have a maximized window. Again, dodges out of the way. So when you have a maximized window like this or have something covering the launcher and you want to see the launcher, how do you get it back? Well, you just move your mouse over to the left edge and after a short pause it reappears. Alternatively, if you go into the top left corner, it instantly appears as soon as you hit the top left corner. There's something a bit odd going on though in this area up here at the top over the, effectively the start button, the dash menu button. Notice that as I move my mouse as I get closer towards the corner it peeks out. This is a bit peculiar and I assume they added it for discoverability reasons just to give people a hint that it's there, but I think it's more confusing and helpful. And it's also annoying because if you're not careful, maybe this is something you get used to I found myself coming up here thinking that the menu that the launcher has been exposed when it hasn't and so I see it and I move down and it moves out of my way. It's very frustrating. So I think they should just get rid of this weird behavior. It's confusing and a bit bothersome. In fact, I would actually prefer if by default they simply had the launcher always visible such that when you maximize a window its left edge hits up against the launcher rather than get hidden underneath. Which would be more in line with what you see in Windows with the Taskbar. I think it's just a matter of defaults. It's the better option for new users and then if they want to they can turn on this auto hiding, this dodging feature. And in fact you can go into the CCSM, Comp as configuration settings and I can actually change this. But I just think they should change the default. So yes, never hide. So now it's always visible. So I'll leave it like that for the rest of this video. The most interesting thing going on with the launcher is what they've done to account for the case where you have more icons that will fit in the vertical space. What they've done, see I've opened more windows and now they don't fit. And so the icons at the bottom, they don't just get scrolled out of view. They start stacking up into what they call the accordion. So these four icons here are part of the accordion. And the way you expand that accordion is by simply hovering your mouse over anywhere on the Taskbar and see they've expanded downwards. And I can click and drag the launcher to move all the icons up and down if I like. And so I've dragged into the view. And as long as I don't mouse out, see when I mouse out they re-contract. As long as I don't mouse out and just come straight down, then I can click on them. One interesting affordance here is that if you can manage to get your mouse sneak it in onto one of the icons directly in the accordion then it will expand around that icon. So here I hover over the bottom most icon and so it expands actually upwards rather than downwards. If I go somewhere in the middle then it expands. See they make sure that your mouse always stays, the cursor stays on the icon you managed to sneak in on. I'm not really sure how useful this is because it's actually really hard to hit these as a target. You almost always end up hitting the top icon or something a bit above it. So I think this is generally pretty good except I have a few quibbles. One is that when this does expand and you scroll I think there needs to be a strong visual indication that hey you have scrolled and so there's stuff downwards and stuff upwards. So what needs to happen here is I'm thinking some sort of maybe glow, some highlight glow at the top that indicates that hey there's more stuff up here and similarly down at the bottom you'd have some kind of glow or a shadow, something like that. Some kind of indication of hey there's more. Another idea I have is that I'm not entirely happy with the expansion behavior, how they always expand downwards. I think I'd prefer it for them to always expand upwards except of course that would be a problem. You wouldn't want to mouse in here and suddenly have these icons fly upwards as the accordion expands upwards. So alternatively what you do is you turn the accordion effectively that whole area, you turn it into like a button such that you actually have to actually click it and then once you click it the accordion could always then expand upwards rather than downwards. I suppose there would be another click but you know you end up having to click anyway when you expand and then have to click the drag to see the rest, to see these down here. Come to think of it I haven't tried stuffing a whole lot more icons into the launcher. I haven't seen what happens when you open like 50 different windows. I'm wondering what happens in that case because does the whole thing become a really compressed accordion that doesn't seem like a good idea. So I wonder what happens there. In any case the last thing I have to say about the launcher is that they give you the ability to reorder these icons but instead of just because clicking and dragging drags this up and down you can't simply click and drag each icon. You have to actually pause the mouse, you have to click on it and hold for a bit before the icon dislodges and then you can rearrange the icon. Alternatively you click and drag to the right. I don't know what's going on there. You click and drag to the right and then it's free. I would simply prefer if they chose one of these two mechanisms probably just go with the click and hold method because actually another quibble is that when you do click and drag I'd rather the icons stay locked horizontally so that when I click no matter where I move my mouse in the x-axis the icon should be only moving up and down not left and right. Simply because it's falsely conveying the impression that you can somehow click this out here and do something with it when in fact you can't. It just flies back into the taskbar. But that's a very small quibble. It's not really a big problem as it is at all. Okay now let's talk about what Ubuntu's done with application windows and their menu bars. So first off what they've done is when you have a maximized window the title bar for that window is integrated into the top bar. So here we're seeing the title for this window. It's closed, minimized, and maximized buttons. And also in the same bar we're looking at the whole system status icons, the panel icons. The second thing they've done is that the menu bar by default is not visible. You have to hover over the title and then it appears. And then the third thing they've done is the menu bar for an application. The active window always appears in the top bar, not on the window itself. This is basically in the style of Mac OS. So here mine is my current application. So that's what I see in the top bar. Notice again it's hidden by default. I have to hover and well it's supposed to be there. It's appearing. And now I click over to Mejong and again I have to hover over the menu bar for Mejong. My objection here, and I think this is the objection of a lot of users, is that these three features just really do not work together. It'd be one thing if they had simply gone to a putting the menu bar always at the top in the style of Mac OS. But you can't do that and then also integrate the title bar of the maximized window into the top bar. You can't have those two things at the same time. You end up with a really confusing situation like this. I have mines maximized but then I open this other window. So now the solitaire is my active window. Look what happened in the top bar. Where you expect to see the title for mines here, what's maximized, is not there. Instead you see also strangely you see redundantly a title which doesn't exactly match this title for some reason. But this is the solitaire title. And so I hover over here and I'm seeing the menu bar not for the maximized window but for the solitaire game. And then also confusingly you have the weird state where if I don't have any active window on the screen then the title bar is blank even though I have a maximized window there. So we end up with a window here, a maximized window that doesn't even have a title bar. So they need to get rid of at least one of these two options. They have to either go with the universal application menu at the top or the maximizing window title bar getting integrated. You can't have both. As for the hidden menu that you have to mouse over to reveal I'm not so displeased with that though I think I prefer it if you had to actually click on the title to reveal it. Basically you make the title bar a big button that you would click to get the menu. But aside from that I would just have it that the menu bar is attached to every window and you would keep the, I do like the integration of the title bar to the top bar of the maximized window that makes sense to me. So I prefer to keep that feature and ditch the global application menus. Okay now let's talk about what's going on with the dash. So we open up the dash by clicking on the Ubuntu logo here and that's my first quibble actually is that this needs a graphical tweak because it doesn't look enough like a button in any case. Another quibble is that when you open it up you have this option down here this button that you don't click and drag but you just click it and that expands it to full screen. I think it's a bit silly. It doesn't change much at this resolution and even at higher resolutions it doesn't really change much. I think it's just sort of a distracting little piece of interface to try this. They should rather just make the thing bigger to begin with or get rid of that button I think. Also you have this toggle here. This is all just one button that hides these eight large buttons which apparently they call shortcuts. For one this label shortcuts I find confusing because I don't think it conveys what these things are and also this home icon is very odd, this house. This has nothing to do with your home folder so I don't know why there's a house there and I think I would just go with having this triangle make it bigger and that would be the only button here if you really had to have this feature. What this does is it just hides and reveals these eight large buttons. I guess because power users probably don't want to see those eight buttons as we'll see those are just really conveniences. I think they're mainly there for discoverability purposes actually. So power users I think are intended to turn them off by clicking here and now actually when they're turned off if I come back see they're still turned off and they'll remain turned off hidden until I click this to reveal them again. In any case, yeah, so what about these eight large buttons? Well the interesting thing is I don't think there's any customizability or you can't pick your own, you're stuck with these eight and the other interesting thing is these are all just really links. They really are just shortcuts except for these two up here. More apps and find files actually are special menus within the dash as we'll talk about in a moment. And these other two here even though they look like they're the same kind of thing like they're also special menus, they're not. These two are actually just submenus as we'll see within the more apps menu. What I would do is I would just take these two buttons put them here and here and get rid of all this rest, this whole pull down because first off these four here if users need a quick way to get to them or if you want to make them really discoverable just make them the top four buttons in the launcher by default and people would have no trouble finding them there. As I said these are just special links into this menu here and these two things, they're also this is something I also don't like they're made permanent members of the launcher so clicking this and this is the same as clicking them in the dash and in fact you can't even move them I don't think I can move them you can actually reorder them between each other so it's kind of silly but I can't move these further up and I also can't get rid of them which I don't like whereas all my other icons here I can remove. So that's something that bugs me. Assuming we keep these two menus as is the files menu and the applications menu as is the links I would prefer that these go up at the top by default and I would prefer that they're removable because as a power user what I think I would want is simply having keyboard shortcuts for those menus like say hitting the Windows key A to open the applications menu and Windows key F to open up the files menu that's what I would I would use as a power user and down at the bottom here also while we're at it this annoys me having the trash here for one it's just another special case and it's just a bit distracting and you know I don't need to get to the trash that often I don't think any users really do Okay now let's get back to the dash and look in the more apps menu what do we see you have these three big rows the top of which is stuff you've used frequently and I assume recently as well and in the middle here's your installed applications listed alphabetically and then at the bottom you have another row here for stuff which you don't have installed but you can download obviously stuff from the Ubuntu repositories and up here in the top right we have this all applications category pull down which lets us filter by category one quibble here they need to make this all look more like a big button because as it is it seems like you have to come over here to this little triangle which would be annoying it's a way too small target this doesn't look like final graphics to me looking at this and also this whole list definitely these need to be bigger this is especially bad at higher resolutions it's just too small I assume that's being tweaked because this doesn't look like final graphics to me I wonder though if they should just do what GNOME 3 does and instead of having this pull down have off to the side the list written out basically that's what GNOME 3 does I think that may be a better solution in any case so over here let me go back to all applications notice that there's more than six installed applications that lets me see the rest but if I click here and then it expands out with a scroll so far so good my main objection here is I'm not a fan of having this download section it's a random selection of stuff from the Ubuntu repositories most of which is not really user friendly for one, okay there needs to be a description I should at least at the very least be able to hover over and get a better description of what the hell this thing is but just in general most of the stuff in Ubuntu repositories is not newbie friendly it's not stuff most users are going to want to bother with so this is mostly just a distraction now what I would like is imagine there's some application I want to use that I don't have installed like well just assume I don't have firefox assault so if I were starting to type firefox because I wanted to find it but I didn't have it installed in my system then it makes sense for this menu to tell me that hey you don't have this but it's available for download and here just click here to install it I like that but just by default always showing here's some random stuff you might like doesn't make sense especially when most of this is as far as I think most users are concerned it's just garbage confusing garbage at that what the hell is python most people just don't have any idea the names are always really confusing too that's just a long Linux tradition of strange application names so I think I would I don't know exactly what I would do I would at the very least make this all less prominent maybe only show two icons have this often a corner or something with smaller icons and smaller labels or not even maybe not even have it appear maybe hide it by default so you have to reveal hey there's stuff you might download until the person starts typing so I start typing firefox and then it's going to recommend you need to install firefox that makes sense looking back now at the find files menu it's very similar same layout though of course different rows these are recent files this is my downloads folder I don't understand what's going on there why is this one directory singled out I'm not sure but then you have links to your favorite folders I suppose makes sense I haven't really used this much so I don't have much to say about it whatever problems it has are probably mostly the same problems with the application menu I do have one problem though with the search boxes because a slightly subtle thing is that in the apps menu and the files menu the search box you get is not the same search box that's why here in the regular dash it says search and so if I type f it's showing me both applications and files but then I go back to the apps menu and I type f and of course it's only showing me applications and in back in files it's only any search is only searching over your files and folders I just don't like how you have effectively three separate search boxes search fields all in the same place that is a bit confusing I believe so ideally you just have well actually ideally really what you do is you somehow integrate the apps menu you get rid of this shortcuts business and you just have the apps menu and the files menu integrated into one and just always appear in the dash then you wouldn't even need these buttons at all or shortcuts to them you just have the one dash menu that's actually what I would do if I were in charge I don't think they're going to do anything like that anytime soon though well in any case that would solve the problem of you don't have to have different search boxes you just have one search box and anything you type would always be searching over your apps and files and then you just have at the top you have the applications and then the bottom you have here's files that's how I would do it ok so the very last thing I'm going to say is that I believe that workspaces by default should be disabled and be very clear I mean by default so if anyone wants them they can go into system settings and turn them back on that's perfectly fine but the argument is that most users are not going to use workspaces in the first place and so they would just be a distraction feature and the other argument and I think the more important argument is that simply a lot of users are going to have a lot of trouble with the concept because there are many users out there who already have trouble with say multiple tabs within browsers and other applications and then they also have trouble with applications just application windows they don't understand the concept very well that they can switch back and forth between windows and again even among these users that do understand the concept perfectly well they just they don't like to use many things at once they don't like having a bunch of tabs open they don't like having a bunch of windows open they don't have a very focused experience so again you're talking about a very significant chunk of people who are never going to use workspaces it's just going to be something they accidentally click on occasionally