A lot has been said and written about Ubuntu Unity, the new ‘shell’ that’s replaced the ‘classic’ default GNOME desktop in Ubuntu 11.04. Despised by many that interpreted Canonical’s break from the ‘open-source’ norm of restricting modifications to upstream platforms to a bare minimum, as a threat to the upstream projects’ existence (a valid point to an extent), that found it to be half-baked and offering little more (if anything) over the classic desktop and a couple of additional programs (e.g. a Dock, a launcher etc.) while much slower and kludgey (a totally valid point, but it’s a 1.0), Unity is here to stay.

It is true that, despite Shuttleworth’s ramblings on his blog, most of Unity is hardly innovative. Most useful things in there can already be found in most modern desktop environments (including some linux desktops) while Unity’s implementation of those very features is hardly the best. But there are also some unique offerings that are different, such as lenses and the proposed (but not yet included, thankfully) windicators. The question there is: are those features really useful? Are they well thought-out?

I think not. Take for example desktop search, a hot subject in mid 2000s desktops that’s been largely solved in an exemplary way in OS X by Apple’s Spotlight and a number of third party tools on that platform (LaunchBar and then Quicksilver are prime examples of early game changers), and even Windows 7 to some extent through the built-in search field in the start menu. Then, with five years of hindsight, Canonical decides to make things somewhat harder for users by exposing the search context to the user in the form of completely separate ‘lenses’ as opposed to keeping the distinction internal (in the same way OS X does) and presenting filtering options in an innovative way. Put it simply: I’d much rather have a single search field, ala Mac OS X’s Spotlight that searches for my input text across ‘data domains’ and contexts and returns useful, filterable lists of data, than the frustratingly badly designed ‘lens’ concept that forces a clear separation of searches while taking up screen real estate and wasting the users’ time with additional clicks and keystrokes.

Which begs the question: why on earth did the fine people at Canonical make such a bad design decision, when the stated mission of Unity was to streamline the desktop while taking less space etc. and at the same time there are numerous implementations of search/launch applications (even in linux) that work significantly better than Unity? Were they afraid of being labelled copycats? Is that worse than been called bad designers?

The same can be said about the new ‘global menu’ and AppIndicators that replace Gnome panel in Unity. Having few replacements for the staple Gnome Panel widgets of yesteryear is fine, given it’s a 1.0. Having botched the whole concept of a global menu through inconsistencies when windows are maximised and in multi-display scenarios betrays a badly designed (viz. not just incompletely implemented) system that shouldn’t have been out in the first place.

Unity has divided the GNOME community by introducing a new shell on the world’s most popular linux distribution. While it’s true that the state of linux desktop has been moving frustratingly slow for a number of years and that a quasi-open project, funded by a commercial entity with a focus on usabilty and æsthetics — exactly like Unity is on paper — could help accelerate its development and help reach parity with the two main desktops in some of the more difficult areas where linux has been falling back over the years. Still, Unity is largely incomplete, it’s missing many of the configuration options and functionality that linux users are used to — nay, demand — and, sadly, what’s there betrays a rushed, badly designed feature set that should never have gone past alpha inside Canonical, let alone be part of the world’s most popular distribution.

Æsthetics and usability go hand in hand. Because many people are visual beings, they function better when they work in a beautiful environment. And that extends to computing. So those two go together.

In typography this is pretty obvious whenever you’ve got to use (even for a short while) a Windows machine: Cleartype, now the default anti-aliasing technique employed by Microsoft, is a hideous, ugly and largely unusable (to me at least) hinting/anti-aliasing technique used by Redmond that’s supposed to make text more legible. I’m writing ‘supposed’ because it doesn’t (at least for me); it never did, but in the process it does succeed into making text look extremely ugly.

What’s surprising is not that Microsoft is not ‘getting’ it. No, that’s pretty well known; it’s no accident that Apple has gone with a much more reasonable approach in OS X (which is, to my eyes, equally legible, but far more beautiful). Which is why you can actually have far superior hinting and still retain the original glyphs, as is evidenced by Adobe’s Reader. Which is why even freetype provides excellent anti-aliasing [even if it's still bugridden and at the same time many linux distributions insist on turning on full-hinting, probably the worst choice they could make].

What is really surprising here is this:

Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer will default in some cases to using ClearType rendering. Some applications that use fonts tuned for ClearType and not bi-level rendering may choose ClearType rendering to maintain the benefits of the font designs. Some applications need higher precision glyph widths like sub-pixel positioning or “natural width ClearType,” and would reflow if they were changed to bi-level or grayscale rendering. Other applications like Adobe Reader have their own built-in text rendering engine that is independent of the Windows graphics platforms. Likewise, platforms like Java on Windows also use their own rendering techniques.

Ok, so you can have applications that have their own rendering engines and don’t want to do anything with ClearType (understandable). But having everyday applications such as Internet Explorer or Office applications being capable of overriding user preferences, only because Microsoft insists on doing simple things in such a complex, backwards manner is perplexing. It’s one thing being clueless, inept, having an ingrained, institutional one might say, sense of kitsch æsthetics, creating fonts for a totally inferior technology and in the process creating a bunch of problems throughout your platform and it’s a wholly different thing when those things turn into an inability to honour user preferences. Totally mad design decisions and a poor system design on the whole.

Having said that, up until lately Apple had its fair share of problems with typography on OS X (incomplete support for non-roman characters, OpenType issues, etc.) and linux is in a laughable state with pango, fontconfig and friends failing to provide a solid foundation that would support high-end uses in the publishing industry (a nice example would be the total clusterfuck that results when you try to use commercial fonts with many styles). But at least there no one pretends that they know better; they move forward, try and fix what’s wrong and create better software; Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to be doing exactly the opposite, at least as far as typography is concerned.

If anything the sudden appearance of Moblin 2.0 Beta and its excellent User Interface has proven, beyond any doubt, that corporate support is essential if linux — and the open source community — is going to survive beyond a very very small niche.

Linux on the server has been doing well despite Microsoft’s pretty good record with Windows Server in the past few years (and contrary to its failings with Vista), its dominant position on the desktop and its proven marketing muscle and the reason for this has been that Linux on the server has had the support of many large corporations living off it.

This has not been the case on the linux desktop, and it is probably the reason why so little has been achieved in the past seven or so years in that field. On one hand, the stagnant Gnome 2 platform barely kept alive primarily by Redhat and Novell that depend on it and on the other the interesting and fresh KDE4 platform that’s extremely immature and incomplete and leaves thousands of everyday use cases unsupported.
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“…And what can we do about it”. Linux usability (and the sorry state of desktop linux) has become a staple of this blog, but bear with me for a bit. Here’s a video by Bryan Lunduke from the Linux Action Show with reasons why the linux desktop still sucks for many (most) users. This comes from someone that like linux and wants to see it succeed; most of the stuff mentioned is pretty valid criticism that touches upon the lack of cohesion, regressions, QA and many other aspects of modern linux distributions.

Moblin 2.0 is a netbook-optimized linux distribution/environment originally created by Intel and largely based on the work by OpenedHand, a startup bought by Intel in 2007. This is the introduction video to Moblin. And, as far as linux goes this is by far the most advanced, well-thought, usable environment I’ve ever seen.

Sure, it may be tailored for netbooks, which means the task of creating it was much simpler than creating a beautiful, usable and functional full-fledged desktop environment; and of course, from a developer perspective Hildon and GTK are not exactly ‘modern’ or well documented, in contrast to — say — modern Cocoa. Still, it’s a fantastic first step in the right direction and shows the promise of what focused work can do to bring FLOSS closer to the state of the art in those areas where it sorely needs improvement.

If there’s anything like Good Clutter.

Have you ever used Ubiquity for Firefox? It’s quite nice, yet somewhat inaccessible for most people. The idea is that with an easy key combination on your keyboard you can bring up a text field that can understand a large number of commands and bring you information related to them. For example you can calculate stuff, show a google map, translate text etc. It’s arguable how useful such an interface is for the majority of people, in the context of a browser add-on, but Ubiquity won’t be the focus of this article. While it certainly has its merits, it’s cousin, Taskfox, a project aiming to bring Ubiquity to Firefox [as in: the core of the browser] is so bad — even at a conceptual level — that’s raising questions as to whether its authors have a solid grasp of usability and the role of an address bar in browser design.

So what’s wrong with Taskfox [as shown in the prototype]? Well, for starters: it — in many cases — embeds web content in the address awesome bar drop-down window at the same time when a fully functional, familiar interface for viewing web pages exists just pixels below. Take for example, the Wikipedia search, shown on the demonstration video. It strikes me as particularly problematic that the awesome bar drop-down menu is inherently abused, turned into a movable widget that persists even after the text-entry operation is complete. Besides distasteful, it’s also problematic; what is the purpose of the Firefox window underneath the awesome bar if we’re only going to be using its crammed popup windows for an increasing number of tasks?
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