Unfortunately, as nice as it looks, the screens make me feel like "not going to install that, looks like Mac".. :(
...or, "why buy something when you can get it for free, freedom included?"
ElementaryOs Luna released
291–300 of 307 posts
Re: ElementaryOs Luna released
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Take the global menu Ubuntu copied. It sacrifices visibility and therefore discoverability of the menu items for visual appeal. I think you are missing some context. Early Apple experiments in GUI design initially used multiple menu bars anchored to the tops of windows, but this was quickly dropped in favor of the current arrangement,[1] as it proved slower to use (in accordance with Fitts's law). The idea of separ…
Nice find. May be correct for Apple - but that isn't why Ubuntu did it, at least not alone. They wrote about it and visual clarity was always a big argument for them. PS: Hiding the items has nothing to do with Fitts Law, it even destroys its applicability...
Visual clarity is a very different thing from visual appeal.
Re: ElementaryOs Luna released
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that worked fine. But I had to install the dconf-editor package first, then invoke dconf-editor from the terminal. Booted my ancient workstation (quad Xeon, nvidia GT520 graphics card) and had the usual issue with 'composited' dekstops and nouveau - very slow screen refresh. This is not a LunaOS specific problem, it happens with Gnome Shell based distributions. (Ubuntu 12.04 drops down to the Unity 2d shell whic…
Weird that you had to invoke it from the terminal. It should have been added to the applications menu.
dconf was added to the applications menu, I just didn't see it until I went to the second page of the menu! Fault between monitor and keyboard. It also took me quite a time to work out how workspaces work...
Re: ElementaryOs Luna released
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice find. May be correct for Apple - but that isn't why Ubuntu did it, at least not alone. They wrote about it and visual clarity was always a big argument for them. PS: Hiding the items has nothing to do with Fitts Law, it even destroys its applicability...
Visual clarity is a very different thing from visual appeal.
Noted and basically agreed. I'd argue that they sometimes are interwoven (clarity can lead to appeal, as far as I remember that is along the line Shuttleworth argued).
Re: ElementaryOs Luna released
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that there are exactly four of them so it turned out like the well-established excellence of Apples design is an happy accident as well? ;) Come on - it is highly unlikely you (=the project) would've arrived at the current result without some form of OSX influence. Anyway, that's beside the point, and if you find that insulting I won't repeat it here - probably enough comments in that direction for now. Trying to…
Resemblance to OSX seems to be quite significantly negative to you, but I would wager it is not for most people. I would also wager that unique visuals are not important for the mass majority of users, and that this also can have a negative impact on usability for many of them. I might have older icons because I'm running Lion on this hard drive (I've got Mountain Lion on my other drive, I don't recall any icon diffe…
Two comments above my first comment micampe posted screenshots. Some of the icons are clearly lookalikes. And even if they weren't: An Apple mouse for a linux-icon is a noteworthy choice and could be called a Mac/apple-Icon even without visual resemblance of the icon style itself.
I don't like it when my comments are called rants when they aren't. I tried very carefully to walk the line here, especially I didn't want to (and didn't) bash Apple.
It's obvious that there is influence and I argued why that may be dangerous. Software design is in a special position, copying Apple can be a bad sign and so on... I won't repeat it.
Re: ElementaryOs Luna released
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yo aroman, moving to GitHub has been discussed several times in the last months, we even have a couple of projects there (www.github.com/elementary), but besides all the reasons you named it's also proprietary software. Still, I believe the biggest reason is translations and PPAs.
>it's also proprietary software. ok thanks guys. Good luck with that.
...which means we can't set up our own instance of it or modify it work as we need (as I outlined above, in its current form it only does a fraction of what we would need it to).
Please don't superimpose your own views about software purity on our practical realities.
Re: ElementaryOs Luna released
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I am personally very happy with your explanation and I completely understand where you are coming from. Apple usually comes up with very elegant UX solutions and sometimes it's just impossible (read, insanely hard) to figure out something different and better at the same time. If it was my duty I'd have come up with the same kind of switchboard design. However, you didn't comment on the mouse icon. Maybe the inspirat…
Thanks for the followup -- I agree. I didn't comment on the mouse icon simply because I didn't make it. Switchboard does not ship with icons, it simply uses whichever relevant icons are available in the theme (e.g "preferences-appearance").
Personally, I agree with you that the mouse icon (and I've stated this elsewhere) is needlessly similar to OS X's. Frankly, the designer likes Apple' design aesthetic and probably liked their icon, and tried to create his own take on it.
Which is fine, but yeah -- it probably shouldn't be something we ship with, given our long-standing history of perceived similarity to OS X.
Re: ElementaryOs Luna released
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one thing that frustrates me about Hacker News, and why I am considering just not bothering with this site in the future. Anytime I am honest about my reactions to stuff, along come the downvoters. You cannot justifiably call people on bullshit, vacuousness, "buck-passing", intellectual laziness, or anything like that. You just have to let everybody else's bullshit slide, or pad your criticism with passive ag…
Honestly don't understand why we can't call them out on this. > Did we actively intend for it to be reminiscent of OS X? Absolutely not This statement is a total lie.
The reason you can't "call us out on it" is because it simply isn't a lie. You may feel differently, but (if it matters), I give you my word that we did not intend for it to look like OS X.
As others have pointed out, I never said that it isn't in fact reminiscent of OS X, or that we did not evaluate the design of OS X along with a handful of other platforms when we created our designs.
The argument here is about intent, not the result. And there's positively no way you can prove the former, as much as you might dislike the latter.
(I would be happy to describe in greater detail the design process if it might help convince you that we didn't set out with the intention of copying OS X.)
Re: ElementaryOs Luna released
#299Re: ElementaryOs Luna released
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do I change the settings app JUST to look different than OS X, and lose out on the well-established excellence of Apple's design? I want to single that statement out and go on from there. I'm a bit hesitant to write this comment because, well, I'm about to criticize you and Apple, and at least the latter tends to invite downvotes and a not so nice discussion. But I think it is important to try to get that message a…
All I can say in response to this is that design is easier said than done. We didn't copy, we came to the same conclusions. I'm not saying those are the only conclusions, but we're not human-computer interaction theorists, we build practical things. Sometimes practicality trumps purity, and sometimes purity trumps idealism. If you're criticizing us for not being perfect and not innovating enough, I can't argue. But d…
It would help you a lot if you kept a blog about how all your design exploration progresses. Later you could point people to that and say: "see, there's a process behind it". Not to mention that it would save a lot of time for those coming after you in the future.