Change the back end, not the UI

Image via CrunchBase

I watched four hours of the Google Atmosphere event yesterday. Sure, a lot of it was Google preening and PR, but there were a lot of surprises. The iPhone and Blackberry were mentioned much more often than android phones. Several different OSes were used for demos, along with different browsers. MS, Zoho, Amazon, and several other Google competitors were mentioned as viable alternatives, which definitely breaks the Marketing 101 rule: "If you're the market leader, never mention your competition." (UFS, why can't you act mature?)

That's not really what this blog post is about, though. I want to mention a couple of gems that were buried deep in lectures and demos. Salesforce.com's new social layer (Chatter) is a blatant rip-off of Facebook. They admit it. They even revel in the fact. Why?  Everyone in the new generation knows Facebook, and everyone understands it. Training costs to start using Chatter are almost zero. Turn it on, people immediately get it, and they immediately start using it. It doesn't matter that the interface for FB sucks or that a new kind of interface would be more efficient.

That brings me to the second, related point: don't change the interface. Add functionality on the back end, but leave the interface alone. The automobile analogy was almost required. Repeat: leave the interface alone. I fear the day GNOME 3 comes out, no matter how clever and "intuitive" it is. I much prefer the work around Elementary Nautilus and integration of Zeitgeist and Tracker. In fact, my old notes for GNOME 3 were pretty much total integration of tagging into the desktop and every application, while leaving the tags to appear as directories in the file manager.

Just something to think about. Cue comments about button placement in 3, 2, 1 ....

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Kubuntu's New Logo

The old Kubuntu logo

Image via Wikipedia

Remember when I said that the new Xubuntu logo was a great model and that other projects like Kubuntu should follow in its footsteps? No? Well, I did. Here's my "I told you so" dance. First mine.

Now let's see what they really did.

Yeah, I got the "k" wrong, but in my defense, the font isn't finished or published. Oh, and theirs looks better. And the emblem is better and more inspired. And ... just about everything is better about theirs.

I suck as an artist. I suck at music, too. ;)

Look at the new boot screen.

Uh oh, old logo alert!. They definitely should have used the same arrangement in both pieces. Thanks Linuxers!

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Moovida 2.0 to Get Rewrite, Going Non-Free

Image via Wikipedia

The Moovida developers (Fluendo) have explained the slowdown in development of the current 1.0 version: it's being rewritten in a different language and with a different architecture, and there's little time to work on 1.0. The new project will be "open, but not to the same extent that 1.0." It will also offer premium content.

Not good news for the little media center that could. It seems time for a fork of the last Free version.

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New in the Mint 9 Menu

Linux Mint 9 has some cool new features for the menu

• You can now edit items directly from the menu. If you want to change the name, the icon, the description or even the command for a particular application, just right-click on it and select “Edit Properties”.
• If your graphics card allows it (you need compositing for this to work), you can change the transparency of the menu. Go in the preferences, select the “Options” tab and change the percentage of opacity.
• There are two new context menu item to let you easily add shortcuts to the panel or the desktop.
• An option which you can enabled to “always start with the favourites”.

Ubuntu User Survey

Yet Again -- I Feel So Alone

Yet another post on Canonical Voices about a new Mac. Hasn't anyone ever heard of dogfooding?

Is the Scrollbar Going Away?

Image via Wikipedia

Mark Shuttleworth recently posted:

Our design roadmap calls for us to reduce the visibility of scrollbars,
and emphasise:

 - touch scrolling
 - scrollwheels

Most people don't scroll with the scrollbar any more. The use the
scrollbar to gauge "how much fo the document am I seeing".

Interesting view on the direction of Ubuntu.