A few months have now passed since the deployment of ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, and we have had ample opportunity to test, use and think about the new shell it premiered. So here’s our two pence.
First off, Unity we likey likey. Although first shocked about the idea to completely revamp the shell and NOT take Gnome 3.0, but instead built upon it and make a new GUI, we kept our faith, bolstered by the thought that one could always switch desktop environments. You quickly adapt to the new panel and the app-starter on the left, and it’s one of the few instances where moving/disappearing starter bars don’t seem to be standing in the way. All in all, you have fast access to the few apps you use all the time, with a scaled degree of quick access to the more remote or obscure ones. So we happily adopted the new view.
Some inconsistencies need to be ironed out for a perfect experience though. Most of them are part of the way windowing is handled.
1) When opening a new window of a running instance, the new window will often appear partly beneath the panel. This requires you to carefully reposition said window each time – and defeats the supposed quality of the top panel of being “untouchable”.
2) Similarly to point 1), there needs to be more usability with opening new windows, or managing new windows, in respect to the different desktops. Often you want to open a new window of a running process, eg. nautilus, but are doing this on a different desktop than the first instance in running on. So you need to first switch back to the original desktop, open the new window, send this one to the aforementioned desktop, switch back to that desktop, and you’re good to go. We’d like to see this being done by once right-clicking on the icon on the app starter bar on the side, saving you from this hassle.
3) The top panel is supposed to change accordingly to the program you’re running as to display the drop down menues of that app. Of course, not all apps have this functionality, as in Libre Office, but most genuine Natty apps do. This one needs to be taken on by the developers rather than Canonical, but it’s not a big inconsistency either.
4) Last but not least, this would have been a good opportunity to tackle the behaviour of the starting windows of apps you’re opening. We need a simple evironment where to define on which desktop a window will be opening, the size and position it will have by default, and whether it will remember its last parameters or start to a default. You can in theory do this by accessing the system preferences and then take on the “Window Rules” in the CompizConfig entry. But that’s a highly technical process, you need to be able to learn the exact position of your window, as in y-axis and x-axis. And, least for us, it does not work. Once having set the Window Rules, the windows then do all kinds of positioning, but not the required one – or they disappear partly under the panel (see point 1)). So, please, give us a simple positioning tool, and we’re never looking back (although we don’t even at this point). Oneiric Ocelot? Oneiric Ocelot we say.
Concerning the software center, it’s a beautiful development of the older one. One of the most compelling points even in the earliest versions of ubuntu have always been that instead of using apt-get install or even synaptic, you could just click yourself through a menu with many applications and install from there – as if you were carrying around an invisible giant disk with petabytes of programs on it at your disposal, all the time. This of course has been expanded, and there’s even a marketplace now. The whole launcher bar of Unity is inspired by the “app store” of the iPhone, with little equally sized icons each representing an app. This standardized view of things helps accessing quicker the things you want to do (and looks quite sexy). It’s also logical to expand on the software center, just like Mac OS Lion embraces the digital-only concept of the Mac OS app store. But Apple wasn’t there first. The really big step was the gui for browsing and quickly installing most apps, and ubuntu has had that for many, many years now, even if they didn’t have the standardized icons and the would-be trademarked name “app store”, both of which the iPhone introduced in 2007 and 2008 respectively.
So, we’re looking forward to our next update in october – and watch our little counter on the right sidebar of this site daily. : )
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Go on and head over to http://www.ubuntu.com/download to dip into Unity.
