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ElementaryOs Luna released

elementaryos.org

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Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#141

Post by quadrangle »

oscilloscope wrote: post #138
jknightco wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they focus none of there efforts on elegant, usable, and consistent design. Because none of the effort done was for design. Its literally a carbon copy of OS X. The layout, the colors, the gradients, the multitasking, the dock, the app bounce on the dock, the music app, the exposé style window layout, the mission control tile multiple desktop layout. Any Linux distro with its own UI spent more time on elegant, us…

The exposé looks like it's laid out slightly differently than OS X and includes buttons to close the window. The multiple desktops is on the bottom and not part of exposé. It includes a new desktop button. It has a dark background rather than blending in with the desktop. It appears you can drag app icons from one desktop to another-- I've never seen that feature before. The header is black/dark grey, not silver. The…

fwiw, KDE has features like dragging icons from one desktop to another.

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#142

Post by quadrangle »

jknightco wrote: post #39
nosefrog wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many Linux distributions focus so much of their efforts on elegant, usable, and consistent design? I would mark that as elementary's primary innovation.

But they focus none of there efforts on elegant, usable, and consistent design. Because none of the effort done was for design. Its literally a carbon copy of OS X. The layout, the colors, the gradients, the multitasking, the dock, the app bounce on the dock, the music app, the exposé style window layout, the mission control tile multiple desktop layout. Any Linux distro with its own UI spent more time on elegant, us…

This comment is just nonsense. What elementary did was obviously use all existing designs as reference and then carefully thought through every detail to determine what they thought was best. They happened to agree a lot with Apple. It is definitely NOT a clone. It is definitely similar. You have no clue about the process in building these things.

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#143

Post by sjwright »

rookieMP wrote: post #135
millstone wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS X System Preferences screenshot: http://imgur.com/RLB8JZp ElementaryOS settings screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/vnjmHrQ.png It's got the same left-aligned, bolded categories, in the same order, with almost identical text. It even senselessly copied the choice of the Apple Magic Mouse as the mouse icon. That tiny smudge at the bottom represents the Apple logo! I don't mean to suggest that an ElementaryOS designer is…

Yeah, I can see that they ripped off the magic mouse icon, but nothing else stands out as being in the least bit egregious.

They're definitely similar; there's no doubt the magic mouse is what's being portrayed. But it's not a direct copy. I'd be more worried about Document Viewer using a variation of the Adobe Acrobat logo.

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#148

Post by msutherl »

aroman wrote: post #137
millstone wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OS X System Preferences screenshot: http://imgur.com/RLB8JZp ElementaryOS settings screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/vnjmHrQ.png It's got the same left-aligned, bolded categories, in the same order, with almost identical text. It even senselessly copied the choice of the Apple Magic Mouse as the mouse icon. That tiny smudge at the bottom represents the Apple logo! I don't mean to suggest that an ElementaryOS designer is…

As a matter of fact, I wrote that very program, Switchboard. It's getting late and I don't want to write a whole book about it's design (though I could), but basically here's the story: I saw some mockups Daniel Fore (the project's founder and lead designer) created for a hypothetical system settings app. Here's an example: http://danrabbit.deviantart.com/art/User-Accounts-Plug-19860... I set about coding the app. I…

There's a certain downside to mimicking the OS X design that you may not be taken full account of, which is that for people who have used OS X, your designs look like a not-quite-perfected copy. It's a sort of uncanny valley thing that manifests itself likewise in the common discussion of whether something feels "native", or whether you should use the OS-provided UI elements vs. re-invent the wheel when writing an app. For instance QT apps on OS X.

It's better to either do an exact copy or to be different enough that you don't invite comparison, otherwise what you've come up with will always look like an inferior copy of the original. At least until the user has spent enough time with it that it becomes the new default. But don't forget that user acquisition is just as important as long-term usability.

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#149

Post by aroman »

yapcguy wrote: post #132
aroman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question. The simple answer is: we don't know yet. We actually had a conference call with some folks from Canonical a few weeks ago discussing this very issue. At present, it seems like there are three options (I'm taking these points mostly from the minutes from that call): 1. Port everything to Qt and use Mir (because GTK+ might not work under pure Mir -- they've been backing Wayland so far). This would requi…

How have you found developing in Vala? What is concurrency and multi-threading support like in the language? With Vala's object system built upon GObject, wouldn't targeting Qt be a problem?

Vala is, all in all, fantastic. The way I describe it to people is "it feels like C# but runs at C speed", and that's pretty much accurate. The only issues we have are binding bugs and Vala bugs, both of which are harder and harder to find these days. And when you do find one, the development community is very active and you can find the help you need.

For concurrency, I have personally written async vala code (which has some excellent support, including closures), but there is full thread support via GObject. The thread safety stuff is the same as the underlying library, and lots of work goes into GLib/GTK+ to make them thread safe where appropriate.

Yes, targeting Qt with Vala would a real problem. That's why we have absolutely no plans to move to Qt :) Not that it hasn't been brought up -- I remember some very vocal discussions in IRC a few years back when a few developers (mostly who have since moved on, interestingly) tried to convince us to jump ship and go to Qt. It was a lot more feasible back then too, since we were still pretty early in the Luna cycle. But the insurrection was ultimately quelled with practical concerns and majority mindshare :)

Re: ElementaryOs Luna released

#150

Post by aroman »

leke wrote: post #147

So is Elementary based on a particular Linux? That is, are the apps coming from debian or ubuntu repositories?

elementary OS is based on Ubuntu. The apps mostly are written in-house specifically for elementary OS, and are developed on Launchpad and published as Debian/Ubuntu packages available through the official Ubuntu repositories and elementary's PPAs.
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