On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 11:58 AM, Ted Gould <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, 2011-12-30 at 23:03 +0100, Jo-Erlend Schinstad wrote: >> Den 30. des. 2011 20:30, skrev Ted Gould: >> > Thanks for writing this up. I appreciate it. We're never perfect, but >> > it's nice to see some positive reviews every once in a while :-) >> >> It was not meant as a positive review and I don't want it to be >> understood as such. > > Sure, it wasn't a review really. I guess it should have read "noting > some of the positive aspects." Though, in general, I was less careful > with my words since I wasn't replying to the mailing list ;-) > >> The point was to separate between what users see and >> what programs see and why that's important. The ultimate goal for me, is >> to teach everyone that there are no fundamental differences between >> 10.04 and 12.04. > <snip> > > In general, you are correct, but I think your language there might hurt > your argument. I think that, for most people, it seems drastically > different because the data is presented in a different way, but it is > fundamentally the same data. So instead of saying "nothing changed" it > might be easier to say "only the emphasis changed." > > As an example we could look at the use case of finding applications. > You can still browse for the applications in groups like you could in > the Applications menu of 10.04. But, it's not as handy. On the flip > side searching them is much, much, easier. So we've switched the > emphasis from browsing to searching.
Switched the emphasis? You mean to say that there is actually a way to browse applications by category in Unity, similar to how the menus were structured in Gnome2-panel? Well, that's news to me, and I've used Unity on 11.10 for tens of hours in a virtual machine while testing my software for Ubuntu compatibility. I would sometimes get pretty fed up with having to type in the name of the application I wanted to launch, instead of just clicking through a few menus. And scrolling through the huge list of applications (I accrued many, many of them because of all the development packages etc) is not convenient, either; nor is it particularly snappy. If this is in fact an explicit feature of Unity, I'd like to know how to access it! I think one of the biggest flaws of Unity isn't a flaw of the software at all, but of the human beings who use it (remember, Linux for human beings?) -- 80% of the users don't know about 80% of the hidden nugget features of Unity, because it's new, different, and likes to "hide" a lot of stuff behind the obvious veneer. So yeah, your attempts to "emphasize" one thing over another have essentially produced a piece of software where the vast majority of the people will only see the obvious features that you stick right under their nose; and if they happen to desire a feature that's in any way occluded or hidden behind a hotkey or whatever, they simply will never ever use that feature because it's not apparent to them. Again, probably not a software flaw as much as a human flaw, but that's how it is. Imagine shipping Ubuntu with a Unity tutorial video on the CD, or (if that makes the CD spinners cringe at the file size of such) a video player that pops up and streams the video from the internet.... Or even, a *series* of videos: one for beginners that just enumerates the most obvious, basic stuff, and two or three more that go more and more in-depth with hotkeys and things that most people don't know about. Your biggest challenge for Unity is similar to what others before you (PulseAudio, systemd, etc) have faced: user education. So educate the users, in an accessible, highly-visible manner! Nobody's going to read the manual; I'm sorry but that just doesn't happen. A video is probably the best way. -Sean > > --Ted > > > -- > ubuntu-desktop mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop > -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
