[ubuntu-art] Karmic boot and login - proposed designs

[Mat Tomaszewski]

mac_v wrote:
> Mat Tomaszewski wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> Not so long ago we announced the revamp of boot and login experiences in 
>> Ubuntu and received a great response from the Artwork Team, with many 
>> interesting concepts being submitted. Thanks again for all your hard work.
>>
>> The deadline approaches fast and the time is now to make final 
>> decisions. We have just returned from the Platform Sprint in Dublin, 
>> where folks directly responsible for making Ubuntu release happen on 
>> time have gathered. The design team's role was to propose final 
>> concepts, communicate them to the developers and make sure they can be 
>> implemented on time. We have received a lot of valuable feedback and 
>> revised our proposals accordingly.
>>
>> The initial assumptions, however, remain unchanged. The Foundations 
>> Team's goal is to start the X server as fast as possible (3-4 seconds on 
>> a reference machine) and therefore, Usplash will not be used in most 
>> cases. A new splash screen (Xsplash) will be developed on top of the X 
>> server and enable a smooth  transition into the GDM and the user session.
>>
>> The latest designs can be viewed here: 
>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Karmic/Boot/Demo. We're looking 
>> forward to your feedback!
>>
>> Many thanks,
>>
>> Mat
>>
>>     
>
> Hi,
> Seems a lot of the good ideas on the wiki were not picked up...
>
> Anyways, just constructive criticism:
> 1- the lack of the progress bar , will be difficult to know when the 
> system loading will be finished.[IMO this is a *regression* , other OS 
> may not have the progressbar but we had a good feature!]
>    the presence of the progress bar actually shows off the good work 
> done in reducing the boot time, you can visually see the boot is quicker 
> than Jaunty and _shows off the speed_ of Ubuntu .[which other OS lack!]
>   

That would be very true if we could make sure the progress bar behaves 
predictably, another words - the progress indication is stable. The 
value of a progress bar that slows down and stops, accelerates, slows 
down again, etc. is not really very high. Since we couldn't ensure the 
consistent behaviour, we decided to use a throbber instead.

Using a throbber has the following advantages:
 - it gives the impression of stability and predictability
 - users will quickly learn how many iterations would occur before boot 
completes, which makes the boot speed easy to track (and helps 
appreciate the *constant* boot performace of Ubuntu!).


> 2- the color of the background is dull , pls choose a more vibrant color.
>
>   

Any suggestions what particular colour we could use and why?

Thanks!
M.