Unity breaks basic UI principles

[Ben Darby]

* Peter N. Spotts (pspotts at alum.mit.edu) wrote:
> I've been playing with this for about a month now, and it seems to me
> that for better or worse (I'm still agnostic at the moment), Unity has
> borrowed, then tweaked elements from Mac's GUI. Even the default
> trashcan icon looks pretty much the same. 
> 
> The sidebar has echoes of the Mac launchbar across the bottom. And for
> an app's dropdown menus, they appear across the top bar in a Mac,
> although no mouse-over is needed to make them appear. It certainly does
> take some getting-used-to after years, yea, decades of menus located in
> an app window.

I've been using natty for a month or two now on a test machine that gets
a fair amount of use next to my main desktop, just trying to get used to
the work flow and changes. I'm still finding it difficult to be as
productive as using the classic gnome panel ui.

* Unity seems to have hijacked the super(windows) key and any settings made
via the keyboard shortcuts app using the super key don't take effect, which
was my main method of launching applications.

* The application menu bar has been moved to the top panel, which seems
like a sensible choice for when you're running in full screen mode and
looking to make use of all available screen real estate. However it's
more likely with a large desktop screen that you'll have a number of
different apps open in smaller windows spread across a few monitors and
virtual desktops, quickly accessing the program menu for one of these
becomes annoying very quickly. I don't see any reason why the
application menus shouldn't remain as is and just move to the panel when
maximised.

* Disabling 3d doesn't seem to be an option when using unity. As long as
it has been around the desktop effects still don't play nicely with
video and in general just seem to consume resources and slow the general
operation of the UI down. This is usually the first thing I disable but
it doesn't seem to be an option other than returning to the classic
desktop with no effects, but how long will this stay around for?

Overall I think there are a few good things to come out of natty/unity
but in its current state I can't justify using it on my main desktop,
but will be interested to follow the developments come 11.10 and beyond
to see how it pans out.


-- 
ben darby <bendarb at gmail.com>