Unity after a week

I refused to use Unity until I figured out how to change the number of workspaces from four to as many as I wanted. Solution found here, It worked and made Unity something I was willing to try.

The side bar is always up and by default only hides itself when you drag a program over it. This makes perfect sense for a tabulate, but I'm on a computer. It was very annoying and I found myself deliberately dragging program windows over it to make it go away. I set it to auto hide. This would probably not work on a tablet. On a desktop, I have found myself just not using the side bar. Solution found here.

Those are basically the two big changes I made that make Unity usable for me. I've been using it for a bit and found one announce that only bites me every so often.

X11 (Unix) interfaces typically focus the windows under the mouse. That is, even if a window is behind another window, if the mouse is moved over the window, you can type in to the window and it will stay in the background. This is a nice way of doing things because it lets you control one program while watching another. It turns out this is really nice.

Unity is supposed to take many of its queues and designs from the OSX (MacIntosh) interface. The window controls are on the left side of the top bar for example. One other change they made is to have the window menus appear at the top of the screen like a Mac. By default, Unity does not have window focus set to mouse over, so this is not an issue. However, when I turn mouse over control on, I have to dodge open windows to make sure the last window I moused over is still on top when I get to the top bar. This setting is adjusted in system - preferences - windows.

I could explain this in two seconds with a video. In words, it is difficult.

Last night I nearly set the window focus settings back to the way they work in MS Windows. I'm not sure if that is something I'm willing to do or not. I have to use Windows machines at work and it drives me nuts how the window focus works. I hear there are ways to make MS Windows do it like X11, but I don't trust it. I do not want to give in on this, but I probably will.

From what I can tell, all the major interfaces are headed to this type of design. The designers are attempting to make a single interface, or perhaps a similar looking interface, for desktops with a mouse and tablets with a touch interface. I'm hearing intelligent people say that a Mac with both a mouse and touch screen is just around the corner.

We have a couple people at work who use iPads and desktops. I watched one of these users then try to use a laptop for the first time in a while and repeatedly try to touch the screen instead of the touch pad. The idea of using the screen based interface is far more intuitive than a touch pad or mouse to be honest. I mean, it is direct manipulation for goodness sake. Direct manipulation will always win over indirect in my mind.

Oh, remember the complaint I had about Ubuntu not accepting my changes to the size and color of the mouse pointer? That is still a problem. As a matter of fact, the fix that kind of worked before does nothing now. I recommend just sticking with the default and dealing with it. This is what the developers are telling people as well.

Future

Why didn't the past tablet systems work? I say it is because they still had a mouse pointer involved. The PC-tablet I saw several years ago ran Windows XP. It still had a mouse pointer. The first thing anyone wanted to do was grab a mouse and plug it in. The difference with the iPad and phones is the lack of a mouse pointer on the screen and designing for that interface from the ground up.

This is why I think the merging of desktops and tablets is doomed. We will end up with tablets and servers. We will have tablets for the user to interface with and servers to run things in the background and do all the heavy lifting. When computers started, there were terminals and servers. We are basically headed back there.