Ubuntu - Getting physical

http://design.canonical.com/2010/09/getting-physical/

by Uncle_Sam • 16 years ago

105 30 16 years ago

design.canonical.com

scrrr• 16 years ago

I think Ubuntu first needs to brush up on its desktop-ui. There's still many little annoyances.

For my use-case (dev + web) it's superior to Windows, but it's no OSX yet. And it wouldn't take that much to make it awesome.

Example from 10 Seconds ago: Resizing the browser-window. I had to use ALT + Middle Mousebutton, because otherwise the resize-area in the corner is too small.

ch0wn• 16 years ago

This seems to be getting worse with each release. I installed Maverick beta yesterday and the resize corner is almost unusable.

patrickaljord• 16 years ago

> I think Ubuntu first needs to brush up on its desktop-ui.

You know a company can work on more than one thing at the time.

To stay on topic, this demo looks pretty cool to me.

antileet3• 16 years ago

> You know a company can work on more than one thing at the time.

I too feel that they need to experiment and push the envelope forward. But Canonical doesn't seem to have _that_ many developers that they can focus on too many items. Of course it's run by some very experienced people, and I'm not one to complain. This seems more like a cool hack which can spawn off an independent community project which might eventually become part of the desktop.

ZeroGravitas• 16 years ago

Is it Chrome? I don't seem to have a resize corner at all in Chrome on Windows. The Firefox/Vimperator on Ubuntu has one, though it's small and not called out clearly.

eitally• 16 years ago

Agreed, but they also need to work with independent app developers to encourage/ensure consistency. Consider what happened to me yesterday: I was unplugged and wanted to see how my battery was doing. You don't do that via the Power Management console, although that is where you change all of the battery/AC settings. You have to left click the battery icon in the top panel and go to Preferences. Arrrgh.

daflip• 16 years ago

I find it's actually quicker and easier to move a window this way, compared to the regular "locate right hand corner, drag and release". Although the combo I use is a little easier than yours (I have resizes mapped to super key+left mouse button).

I was a solid windows user for many many years and now find myself getting frustrated using it when I have to hunt for the edge of a window. Maybe it's just me ...

thomas11• 16 years ago

Awesome, I didn't know about Alt-middlemouse to resize, and now I love it :-) Thanks.

acabal2• 16 years ago

If I remember correctly corner resizing has been a bug for something like years (no time to look it up now). It's especially annoying when using a trackpad, but nobody wants to bother to fix it I guess. I can't believe this is something that doesn't annoy a single Canonical developer enough.

Edit: November 2007: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/metacity/+bug/1603...

davidw2• 16 years ago

> I can't believe this is something that doesn't annoy a single Canonical developer enough.

The cool thing about open source is that anyone can fix this bug.

That said, it's pretty annoying and I wish Canonical would devote some developer time to fixing it.

Edit: I don't get the downvote. It really is a beautiful aspect of it: if you need something fixed in a certain way, you can, you are no longer beholden to anyone.

duairc• 16 years ago

Why is that bad though? I find OS X unusable because it doesn't have alt + middleclick to resize.

Pewpewarrows• 16 years ago

I agree that there are parts of the UI that could use some fixes (I think papercuts is the term people are throwing around these days).

But are you kidding me? The Alt+MouseKey combos for moving and resizing windows around is probably one of my favorite features of their desktop interface. The moment a coworker or friend sees me do it they immediately start telling me how "awesome" it is and plead for me to "make it work" on their Windows or Mac PC.

antileet3• 16 years ago

It was an interesting proof of concept. I'm not sure how much the parallax-correction or full-screen toggling would help but there seem to be many more possibilities. This is a great opportunity for Canonical or other developers to build in a gesture-recognition framework which other developers can plug into and build applications.

Think about it - a gesture can mute the sound, so you don't need to pause the music when a phone call comes in. Get up and leave, and the screen will lock itself. Stick out your tongue and it'll check your email. Heck, I'm sure soon enough Ubuntu will detect your face seeming sad during debugging sessions and automatically shows kitten pictures (Emacs probably does this already, I'm not sure).

sdfx• 16 years ago

Yes, this way of interacting with your pc could be a nice addition to existing ways like touch or voice recognition, particularly if this is part of a system wide framework. Locking your screen when you are not in front of it (and eventually logging you back on as soon as your face is detected) could be a not too invasive first step in this direction.

Instead of me waving my hands to mute the sound I'd prefer the microphone to pick up my ringtone and mute itself. From a technical point of view, this all is possible for a couple of years now, no? So what's the reason why this wasn't implemented earlier? Maybe people find running a webcam all the time too invasive or the concepts too unintuitive?

antileet3• 16 years ago

Remember when voice recognition was all the rage? I remember when I was younger and some kid on the block got a copy of some voice recognition software. Plus, he was the only one with a computer with horsepower to run it. Anyways, we all sat down and tried to train it - given the fact that we were in India and our accent isn't very easily understandable by most humans, let alone computers - we did see some results.

That kid would have the time of his life saying "Open solitaire" loudly and clearly into the microphone a gazillion times, and the system would interpret it as "delete my homework" or "email grandma all my private files".

All this seems pretty neat, but when it comes to just getting a little work done - I'm still skeptical about how much advantage touch, motion, gestures, speech, etc will help.

I am very excited about gaze tracking though. I don't think it's too long before I can switch from one window to another by just looking at it and twitching my eye.

cabalamat• 16 years ago

> If the user moves further from the screen while a video is playing on the focused window, the video will go automatically to fullscreen.

No.

It shouldn't do this, I don't want this to happen. The computer should do what I tell it to (making it go fullscreen is just one keypress FFS), not what it thinks I want to do, because it'll inevitably get it wrong from time to time.

astine• 16 years ago

Do you want your screen saver to turn on only when you click a button? There are a number of behaviors that you want your computer to do automatically without your input and a proximity sensor can help it do these things more intelligently. If auto full-screening a video is not one of them, you can always turn that off.

vlucas• 16 years ago

> Fullscreen notifications > If the user is not in front of the screen, the notifications could be shown at > fullscreen so the user can still read them from a different location.

This sounds like an excellent way to play pranks on co-workers. "Bob, your shipment of Viagra has just arrived!". The trolling is on.

jrockway• 16 years ago

Good blog post. Good UI, maybe not.

For fullscreen video, I set "fs" in my .mplayer/config. For notifications while I'm away from my computer, I use my phone. For seeing behind windows, I simply don't allow windows to overlap. (How do I know if something is on another desktop? I don't -- that's the window manager's job too. I press S-a to spawn or go to emacs. I press S-s to go to a web browser (or create one). I press S-d to go to the next urxvt. Instead of making my brain remember where my apps are, or making my eyes look for them, I just let the computer do that for me.)

Anyway, I guess these things make the computer seem "cooler", but I think they all kill your productivity. Only show me notifications every 45 minutes unless they are tagged as work and it's between 9-5. Manage my windows for me. Make the video full screen if the content is longer than 1 minute. Then let me use my 8 CPU cores for something other than popup boxes saying my friend is online.

bad_user• 16 years ago

> For fullscreen video, I set "fs" in my .mplayer/config.

This is not intended for you.

liuliu• 16 years ago

We are making web browser aware of gestures (http://api.alii.tv/, http://pprevolution.com). For now it is still a plugin based technology (only works on Windows and Mac), but we do plan to leverage Native Client to make it more accessible.

Ubuntu - Getting physical

Related Stories