Unity breaks basic UI principles

[Peter N. Spotts]

On Thu, 2011-04-28 at 18:30 +0100, gvim wrote:
> I just upgraded to 11.04 and I can't believe how bad the new Unity desktop is. Apart form being buggy the design breaks fundamental UI principles, the most obvious being that I should be able to see menu items in application windows without mousing over the title bar. Furthermore I can't grasp what Ubuntu think they've gained by hiding menu items like this. It doesn't even save space. When I open GIMP for image editing instead of hitting a menu item directly I now have to first mouse over the title bar and then locate the menu. 2 steps where there was 1. How is that progress?!#@
> 
> Another thing - I now have to hunt around and search for simple application categories like Preferences and Administration. Even then the search results seem incomplete compared with 10.10.
> 
> The Dock-like sidebar is a good idea - at least now the application icons look professional - but it should be configurable. Without options it's just an imposition. Ubuntu - stop dictating. Linux is about options.
> 
> gvim  
> 

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.

We'll see how it goes...

With best regards,

Pete

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Peter N. Spotts | Science reporter
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