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PuddingKnife
September 21st, 2011, 11:12 PM
When Ubuntu 11.04 was released, the world was introduced to the Unity interface for Ubuntu. It was considerably different than all that had come before, though its roots were in netbook versions of Ubuntu.

With 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, Unity has matured a bit and given a healthy dose of polish. The dash is more visually striking --the panel and launcher become equally transparent. Mousing over the launcher icons after activating the dash will restore their color. Even alt+Tab has been given a very modern look and behavior.

In Unity you can see a lot of inspiration from both Windows and OSX. You can also see a lot of creativity and original design elements.
I think 11.10 will have a much more coherent look and feel than what we got with 11.04; I also think there is a lot of room for improvement.
Some things I would like to see:

-The dash kind of fades in and out of existence. A better visual match would be a 'growing' animation like what we see with the alt+Tab function. When you press the down arrow while holding alt+Tab, the window will grow to give a preview of the highlighted window. If the Unity dash could 'grow' toward the bottom right corner of the screen, it would be a slick companion to the animation that alt+Tab presents us with.

-The launcher is lifeless. Yes, it has pulsing glows. There is no mouse-over behavior like what we would find in a Windows 7 or OSX installation. In Windows 7, the mouse over behavior is quite nice, it will 'light up' the icon background with the predominant color of the icon, and the hue will be more intense depending on the position of the mouse cursor. In OSX, there is a very smooth 'fisheye lens' zoom effect when mousing over icons on the dock. I think some sort of mouse-over behavior is necessary for the launcher.

Those are my two main gripes with Ubuntu so far, barring the hidden menus and window controls.

What do you think? How would you visually spice up Ubuntu? Mark Shuttleworth wants 200 million Ubuntu users in a couple years. I think he's going to need something that gets their attention.

ninjaaron
September 21st, 2011, 11:14 PM
I think this thread will be moved.

PuddingKnife
September 22nd, 2011, 02:14 AM
I think this thread will be moved.

Thanks for your input. I imagine you mean 'Recurring discussions'. :/