is now

Giving Windows applications their own Icon

Today, however, I want to show you another kind of icon that until now has been represented by a boring default diamond with a question mark.

The small numbers in the corner show the version of the program when it’s available.  This is a piece of metadata that Windows has supported for years, but since it’s not visible in the user interface no one’s really known about it.

The new icons will be available tomorrow in the next Wine 1.2 release candidate package from my PPA.  My intention in Maverick is to include them by default, before Wine is even installed.

Working together

I’ll be honest: Wine needs your help.  The above work was heavily based on community input (and code by Jan Nekvasil).  I’ve got some more visual and UI changes in store for Maverick as well, but what Wine really needs is help testing its release candidate.

We need to hunt down every application that worked perfectly in older versions of Wine and make sure they haven’t broken.  Literally millions of people will be using Wine’s 1.2 release for at least the next year, and if we allow even one major regression it’ll be the digital equivalent of the vuvuzela.

But while we’ve already found and fixed hundreds of regressions, there are a whole mess of applications we still haven’t tested.  Wine doesn’t really have a QA team to handle this kind of thing – it’s just you and me, folks.

So please, join the Platinum Regression Hunt.  It’s as simple as running your applications in Wine and telling us if they don’t work anymore.

March 3rd was a strange day. It was one day before User Interface freeze for the upcoming Ubuntu Lucid long term support release.  By the end of the day we were supposed to have the entire look and feel of the desktop settled on so people could start writing documentation and books.

This was the same day that Canonical finally released the new theme that had been under secretive development.  It was bold, daring, light-inspired, and perhaps most popularly, not brown.  Jono Bacon, Canonical’s community manager, broke the news.  Mark Shuttleworth followed up on his own blog, thanking three members of the design team for leading the effort.

The most important change, however, wasn’t actually talked about.  The designers don’t blog themselves, and Mark and Jono didn’t mention it directly.  It had to be found in the screenshots, or experienced firsthand by alpha testers.

This is not ok

Soon, the community learned the change was intentional: a bug about the misplaced window controls was quickly marked invalid,  and when the controls briefly reappeared on the right again the change was reverted.  What’s disturbing is that Planet Ubuntu has been rather silent on the topic.  No one’s posted a real defense of this change yet, or for that matter even claimed responsibility. It’s like there’s this collective unease about criticizing something that feels like it came directly from on high.  So, instead, people are just silent.  I’d certainly be if I worked for Canonical.  Perhaps I should be, as I still hope to work for them.

If you read between the lines, you can tell that people aren’t too happy about it.  The most flattering thing a developer’s said about the left-sided Window controls is that they “got used to them after a few days”.  We’re quick to praise the theme (it’s gorgeous), but talking about this major sudden change to the window controls feels like taboo.  That’s incredibly unhealthy for a community project.  It’s like there’s this collective unease and everyone’s worrying if we’re about to release something embarrassing.

This experiment was a failure and we need to realize it

The alpha releases are great places for usability experiments.  Sometimes, they don’t work out.  Put a new user on today’s Ubuntu Lucid and they’ll think it’s fantastic, sleek, and absolutely gorgeous right up to the point where they have to close a window.  That’s where our first impression becomes something awful.

Note: The new card backs pictured above are my doing and are now default (Mads Rosendahl drew them).

A brief summary of the complaints about the left side window controls

Some of these I noticed myself, a few are gathered from various comment threads on forums and blogs over the past week.

• Because the window title isn’t centered, the window controls being placed directly in front of it put it in a weird indented position
• The “slightly off left” location is inconsistent with Nautilus, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Empathy, and every other tabbed program we have, which have close buttons for their tabs on the right.
• The left position is inconsistent with Windows, previous versions of Ubuntu, and even OSX – users have to relearn decades of muscle memory.
• Users who interact with both Windows and Ubuntu machines (or migrate from Windows) will have a much harder time than they did before.
• The buttons are too close to the file and edit menus, making catastrophic misclicks much more likely.  Closing something on accident should be as rare as possible.
• Even without misclicking, a user will have to take more time to use the window control and avoid a misclick.  This is an example of Fitt’s Law.
• The close position is also inconsistent with the power button in upper right.  Currently, “close it down” is something you can always do from the upper right anywhere in the system: within a tab, within a window, and even for the whole computer.  The new window controls break that entirely.
• The new position leaves a lot of empty, wasted space in the upper right of most windows.  While strictly speaking the amount of unused space is the same, it looks much worse when it’s all clustered together.  When the controls are on the right, the extra space can function as a buffer for the potentially destructive window controls.
• Similarly, the upper left of most windows now becomes much more crowded, creating a rather unpleasing contrast to the relatively empty upper right.
• In previous Ubuntus you could close windows on the left if you really wanted, by expanding the small circle menu that’s now gone entirely.  File->Quit is also an option, which is now very close to the close box.
• Gnome upstream has them on the right, causing consistency and developmental problems when we deviate.  This is particularly jarring with the adoption of future projects like Gnome shell and Gnome 3, which will change again how we interact with window controls.
• The current implementation breaks themes not designed for the new button order (which is currently every theme we ship, so even changing the theme back doesn’t help)
• A day before User Interface freeze of a long term support release is the worst possible time to suddenly spring this on everyone without explanation.
• It is very difficult to change them back as we don’t have any UI tool for doing this (the current method is manually editing gconf keys)
• The new position doesn’t actually do anything beneficial.

That last point is the most important.  Other than “looking different” the change doesn’t do anything helpful.  It’s a huge usability loss for an awful lot of people.  Some people get used to it quickly.  Others don’t, and like me end up getting physically angry when trying to use their computer.  I can’t remember ever having my computer make me feel this way for a long time, and I’ve been running Ubuntu alphas for five years now.

Let’s admit we have a problem

Ivanka deserves credit for being the first member of the design team to at least talk about the controls:

Are we smoking crack to think that the learning curve or getting used to a new position is ever going to be worth any real or perceived benefit of new positions?

I’ll leave that question to the reader.

Sutor said they need to focus on usability, stability, security, reliability, performance, with some cool thrown in, as well…  I think making it a complete drop-in replacement is a dead-end strategy.

Sutor’s speech on desktop Linux has inspired me.  Accordingly, I’d like to present the…

Bob Sutor Guide to Running a Marathon

• Overall fitness is important on race day. You’ll need to focus on your endurance, your heart, your leg muscles, your feet, your abs, your waist, and some arms thrown in too.
• Running form is important on race day. You’ll need to focus on your breathing, your leg motion, your arm movements, the length of your strides, and some pacing practice thrown in too.
• The training routine is important on race day. You’ll need to focus on finding other runners to practice with, self discipline, getting a top personal trainer, and some knowledge of the track thrown in too.
• Don’t try and win the race.  That’s a dead-end strategy.

You’ll note that Bob left out “compatibility” from his list of things to focus on.  A strange omission, coming from the company that witnessed IBM Compatible computers dominate the PC industry without actually being sold by IBM.  Compatibility then meant being able to run Microsoft with the same hardware and software.  It still does today.

We’re pretty good at hardware.  My girlfriend got confused by the manual that came with her latest printer: it gave 12 steps for Windows, another 12 for Mac, and then an additional 6 for both.  There were no Ubuntu instructions.  Turns out all she had to do was plug it in, the first thing she would have tried if there wasn’t a scary manual making her think printer setup required some sort of shaman dance.  This is a good problem to have, although having to tell your girlfriend to stop shaking her hips at the printer is perhaps an even better problem to have.

Winning

Hardware works, but we haven’t won yet.  We could make every single graphics card, printer, digital camera, and music player work out of the box flawlessly and we’d still miss the market completely. We wouldn’t actually be compatible.  What we have is a software problem. That’s why I work on Wine.

IBM management has never really believed in Wine as a technology, even though their own engineers find it useful. Jeremy White has even said that IBM Managers weren’t very helpful.

For my part, I’m going to ignore IBM’s failed attempt at leadership and focus on what actually matters: making things work for users. Only if we become compatible can we be at least as good. Then people give us a try, and notice we’re actually better. That’s when we win.

Here, let me highlight it for you in case you missed it.

That’s at least five different places where we tell the user to restart.  This is, as I would say to my students, a redundant use of redundancy.

I think we can give our users a bit more credit here.  Consider this version:

That pretty much says the same thing, with no text at all.  But even that may be more than is needed.  Suppose you just ran update manager, installed a system update, and then saw this:

For those of us who’ve used update manager before, this isn’t much of a puzzle to figure out.  The computer is asking for permission to do something, and since we just ran update manager it’s probably a system restart.

What’s important

Whoever wrote this dialog obviously wanted to get across the message that a restart was about to happen.  Well, they succeeded, but now we have a problem of wordiness.  This dialog doesn’t just say restart, it also says this:

So let’s use the example above and improve this dialog a bit, emphasizing what’s actually important:

Not bad isn’t it?  The important bits are in there, and they’re no longer lost within a 3 paragraph beast.  Let’s try and humanize it a bit without losing these advantages.

Same message, much more readable.  Removing the title is an interesting change: now it doesn’t feel like reading a document for homework, but instead something predictable and very easy to understand.  This is just a first draft, of course, but since it’s something literally millions of people will see, I think it’s worth taking a bit of time to get it right.