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Ubuntu Phone OS Unveiled
Today Canonical announced Ubuntu for phones. The new operating system is designed to provide easier access to apps and content than is provided by current mobile OSes. They do this by relying on swipe gestures from the edges of the phone's screen. "Every edge of the phone is used, letting you move faster between apps, settings and content. A short swipe from the left edge of the screen is all it takes to reveal your favourite apps. Page either left or right from the home screen to see the content you use most. A full left-to-right swipe reveals a screen showing all your open apps, while a swipe from the right brings you instantly to the last app you were using. ... A swipe from the right edge takes you back to the last app you were using; another swipe takes you back to the app you used before that. It’s natural to keep many apps open at once, which is why Ubuntu was designed for multi-tasking. ... Swiping up from the bottom edge of the phone reveals app controls." The Ubuntu phone OS is built to work well on low-powered devices. Canonical will be at CES next week working on raising interest from manufacturers. As far as software goes, they have this to say: "Web apps are first class citizens on Ubuntu, with APIs that provide deep integration into the interface. HTML5 apps written for other platforms can be adapted to Ubuntu with ease, and we’re targeting standard cross-platform web app development frameworks like PhoneGap to make Ubuntu ‘just work’ for apps that use them." (In the attached video, the phone OS discussion starts at about 6:37.)
Here's the keynote. Skip to about 6:35 sec for the new bits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWHJDLsqTU
Direct link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWHJDLsqTU&feature=player_detailpage#t=401s
First thoughts:
2014 is a long way away and a whole year is an eternity in mobile space.
It kind of looks like Unity in portrait mode but without the dock.
What does it bring new to developers that isn't there in Android? Firefox OS's USP is web apps with native bindings(same as WebOS').
It says it uses the Android kernel and drivers to be compatible with the hardware, so will OEM(s) shipping devices with this OSes fall foul of Google's anti-fork rules[1] for Android? Or does that apply only to the Android SDK/Dalvik VM?
[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57512418-94/alibaba-google-forced-acer-to-drop-our-new-mobile-os/
This space for rent.
I hate the way iOS has gradually made it harder and harder for me to interact with the app I have open rather than the OS. Dragging from screen edge, tapping with the wrong number of fingers... All sorts of things get eaten by the OS, so I end up doing something other than interacting with the app.
Now, in their own tragically quite imitable style, Canonical appear to have decided that the problem with the intrusion of the OS into the app's UI is that it does not go far enough.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
This sounds very similar to the way the current (OS 2.1) on the RIM Playbook works, not a bad thing as it works well.
K Man
Windows 8 has been such a mind blowing success that we just have to get that swiping stuff into Ubuntu. Apparently.
Copying other people's ideas is not necessarily a bad thing. Claiming the ideas as your own, without crediting the sources is So, how about crediting the ideas to the right people?
I used to do something like that to get decent functionality out of the SMS app on the iPhone.
That nonsense is why I defected to Android.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
But I'm seeing two benefits:
1) If Canonical can get traction with the OEMs, maybe there will be more diversity in the type of hardware available. Might open up the "mobile OS hacking" subculture even further, allowing people to come up with novel, mobile GNU/Linux distributions.
2) Allowing devs to write/ship mobile applications in something other than ObjC (iOS) and Java (Android). I don't think it's possible or viable today, for example, to write a full Python mobile application and ship it. Sure, there are some pet projects out there that will, with some effort, let you kindasorta run things like Perl or Python on Android, but anything other than ObjC/Java are second-class citizens, currently.
Perhaps having Ubuntu begin to carve out even a little space here might help open the market a bit to more interesting and useful approaches to mobile operating systems?
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Canonical is dedicated to fixing problems in Unity to the point of having a dedicated team doing just that. Turns out, though, that making Unity work like a clone of Microsoft's Windows XP is just not in the cards, no matter how much Gnome2 used to try. Sorry.
It looks in many ways like what I have on my Nokia N9 with MeeGo Harmattan. The Linux for mobiles that was doomed before it was finished.
The swipe functionality is really great and one reason I still love it, even though it does have its own set of problems, which is mostly because it didn't get the time to mature. When I for example sometimes have to for many seconds and up to minutes before something happens, doesn't make me a happy camper.
Another good part is the keyboard designs, which is very clear with the Japanese keyboard on the N9. Pres one key and swiping up, down, left or right gives you other options. Thereby you can have larger initial buttons, but with several options popping up, and when you learn the keyboard it is really fast for such a small screen/keyboard.
Again, the swipe functionality is a great way to interact with a touch screen device, and is a step in the right direction from just having pinch-to-zoom.
> What do you think you are doing to Debian?
Bathing it, shaving it, dragging it out of the cellar, exposing it to sunlight and getting girls to play with it.
In the video, shuttleworth goes on about how ubuntu is this revolutionary way to have the same software on your phone and desktop. Umm, did he miss the memo about windows 8? I mean I know Windows 8 sucks and all, but ignoring the big gorilla in the room just makes him seem out of touch.
Looking at their approach here something occurs to me: the ui is almost self-consciously different from iOS. The layout of Android's ui has many parallels with iOS and partly for this reason Android phone makers are haunted by the ghost of Steve Jobs' lawyers. Of course, many of those elements are perfectly obvious to any ui designer working when smart phones were taking off (e.g. let's put icons in a grid pattern). Looking at this Ubuntu phone ui, especially some of the stranger elements of it, I can't help but wonder whether the design is different for the sake of being different, i.e. different for the sake of being competitive in a world where superficial resemblance can have a product banned from import. Were I a smartphone manufacturer, knowing all Samsung et al. have gone through with Android, an OS which had a very different ui (with, et al., no slide to unlock, a different approach to gestures, and no home button requirement) might be worth careful consideration for those reasons alone.
With the Hitchhiker's Guide mark II in Douglas Adams' fiction he tried to show us the way of the light -- The "best" user interface in this or any Universe.
"And can you hear me when I say this?" it said, this time in a sepulchrally deep voice. .", [She] gestured helplessly off into the distance.
"Yes!"
There was then a pause.
"No, obviously not," said the bird after a few seconds. [...] Now. How many of me can you see?
Suddenly the air was full of nothing but interlocking birds. [...] It was if the whole geometry of space was redefined in seamless bird shapes.
[The user] grasped and flung her arms around her face, her arms moving through bird bird-shaped space.
"Hmm, obviously way too many," said the bird. "How about now?"
It concertinaed into a tunnel of birds, as if it was a bird caught between parallel mirrors, reflecting infinitely into the distance.
"Well you're sort of . .
"I see, still infinite in extent, but at least we're homing in on the right dimensional matrix. Good, No, the answer is an orange and two lemons.
"Lemons?"
"If I have three lemons and three oranges and I lose two oranges and a lemon, what do I have left?"
"Huh?"
"Okay, so you think time flows that way, do you? Interesting."
And on CLIs Adams has this to say:
Don't imagine you know what a computer terminal is. A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a type writer in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.
Don't you see? The "OS" of the HGv2 came with no assumptions whatsoever of the way you would perceive to use it. After a brief initialization period it had collected the temporal ordering, number of perceivable dimensions, mater vs antimatter (read: left or right handed 3D coordinate system), mode of communication, etc. CLIs remained as an important fall back, despite advances in UI.
The problem with today's UI design is ignoring that everyone is different and assuming that anyone truly knows anyone else, or especially the gestures they'll want to make. Sure, humans have some physical limitations which dictate certain UIs: Keyboard and Screen being a prime example of optimal textual IO; However, when it comes to symbolism and gestures this is the realm in which the humans are most differentiated, it is what defines them. Being primarily symbol interpretors themselves capable of imbuing deep meaning to the simplest of glyphs or gestures, the humans are so varied in terms of gesturing and symbolism that any non-prescient design is a restriction placed upon the very essence of a human. For example: If I make a full left to right gesture on this phone UI it will show me all the open apps. If I make the approximate same gesture with a finger (my thumb) across my neck it means "Kill 'em dead", such disparities are inevitable. Scratching ones head would have been a much better gesture to trigger display of all open apps...
Sane defaults that are Customizable is the only acceptable UI solution.
To the UI designers of the world, especially to those of Apple, Microsoft, Gnome and Ubuntu I suggest you fully read all of Mr. Adam's works, especially Mostly Harmless. Thereafter you may be able to extract the true meaning of this one simple gesture I wish to convey to you:
Only the 3rd digit on both hands fully extended, both hands extended in your general direction, and shaking with intensity.
2013, year of the Linux deskt..... wait, what?