Yesterday it was announced that GNOME 3.0 is delayed till next year. The extra time has given the Shell Developers some more time to play around with new concepts and they have come up a new mockup. Here are the new mockups.
Yesterday it was announced that GNOME 3.0 is delayed till next year. The extra time has given the Shell Developers some more time to play around with new concepts and they have come up a new mockup. Here are the new mockups.
…it seems it has a bit of the iOS UI look about it… I think that is a great thing. Be interested to see this in action.
Right-click anything in the dock on OS X Snow Leopard and you see this a bit too…
Not saying iOS or OS X had this first, I have no idea…
It’s great to see Gnome getting some polish.
I actually think it looks more like maemo/meego.
Who do reviews these days? It seems to be only based on personal view and not neutral at all. How can you come up with some sort of proper review of the mock-up and make assumptions about how it’s going to work?
I also wish people would stop comparing UI designs to “Jolicloud” or OS X. Who doesn’t copy UI layouts and designs ideas today?
It just annoys me when such write ups like this seem to be purely about their opinion, and opinion should be in your last paragraph or not at all.
Shocking revelations: Reviews are based on the opinion of the author!
Well, Bad reviews have opinions throughout like this one. Good reviews are not based on personal opinion because they’re reviewing it for the wider audience.
I think OSAlert should stick to review like Ars do, rather than junk like this.
So you would rather your reviews be 100% objective, right?
http://www.destructoid.com/100-objective-review-final-fantasy-xiii-…
Quite an engaging read, wouldn’t you say? There is no such thing as an “unbiased” review; that’d be a report. The reviews on Ars can be *plenty* opinionated (see: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2009/10/psp-go-review-sony-is… ), often even by the authors’ own admission.
Edited 2010-08-01 04:00 UTC
A small comment on FF XIII. I was playing it the other day when suddenly I realized the music playing was almost exactly the same as the music played in the castle in Zelda – A link to the past. Anyone else noticed that?
That looks like Ubuntu Netbook Remix with a search function.
It does, doesn’t it? Oddly, neither OSAlert nor the linked article say where they found these mockups… I wonder if these are really from the Gnome Shell developers, or are they something someone else has dreamed up as a hybrid of Shell and Ubuntu’s Unity?
The panel (on the left) looks like Docky/Gnome Do. The icons in the middle look like UNR or Jolicloud.
Either way, it looks like something that belongs on a Netbook, Tablet, or iPhone. The market is getting saturated with these interfaces.
I switched from KDE to Gnome just the other day because the latest update broke a bunch of components I use, and some others just plain disappeared. I gave it a week to see if they showed back up or started working… didn’t work. The reason I switched is because on my DESKTOP PC that I do web design and development on, I want a DESKTOP centered environment. Not something designed for working on one app at once. (like Netbook/Tablet interfaces.)
If the two big players don’t start shaping up, I’ll probably look at one of the other offerings (Xfce, E17, etc)
So yeah, I wouldn’t mind the new shell on my Tablet or Netbook, but not on my workstation.
That depends… these mockups appear to show a full-screen UI that appears when you open the Activities view. What they *don’t* show is what you get when you’re actually working.
My impression is that under normal use, the shell will get out of the way, leaving something not disimilar to what you have now, the panel across the top – *not* a netbook-style UI where everything runs full-screen all the time.
Ah, apparently they’re from Jon McCann’s talk on Gnome Shell from the Guadec conference…
http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2010/08/01/shell-yes/
There’s a (short) video included that gives a better idea of the interaction…
Wtf is this shit…
http://twitpic.com/2ad7qh
Actually, could you do that for every site that is linked to, that way we can just read the miniscule green areas and ignore the surrounding quamire of bullshit.
Thom_Holwerda queried…
Adblock–use it.
–bornagainpenguin
Looks just fine here http://bayimg.com/cAoCiAACb You seem to have a problem with your adblocker, Thom.
I consider the GNOME Shell concept a pretty heavy handed one. Maybe I’m just getting old.
After everyone having a jolly good laugh at the disaster of KDE 4.0 (and it was terrible), Gnome is now well on track to do the same thing, but worse. KDE just had instability and missing features to contend with, but Gnome will also have a fundamentally new design, and after 20 years of tweaking small variations of the normal desktop concept with task bar will be incredibly hard to get right, or even close to usable.
The desktop environment has stagnated and that’s a good thing. It works for most people, and Gnome messing with it at this point is far more likely to make it worse than better.
Nope, Gnome is actually doing pretty well. They haven’t changed much of the underlying infrastructure of Gnome 2, just the user interface. KDE 4.0 failed because it was a complete rewrite with all new technology.
Gnome Shell is really the only major fundamental change in Gnome 3. And it’s just a window manager. The apps are largely the same.
No, it’s not. The desktop needs something new. KDE 4 is probably the most impressive desktop right now, and it’s still just the basic taskbar, windows, widgets, etc. There is a lot out there that has not been explored.
I haven’t really liked the Gnome Shell releases that I’ve tried, but I’ll admit that I like the concept and it’s nice to see something new for a change.
By what measure?
The user interface is what everyone sees. KDE had plasma which wasn’t ready, and Gnome has their new shell, which isn’t ready. The rest of the KDE framework didn’t cause problems.
So the thing that users interact with every day all day is fundamentally different. Just like KDE’s plasma. The apps most people use (Firefox, Openoffice) didn’t change there either.
Why? Just cause? What precise problem would that solve? How exactly will a new desktop paradigm solve problems for users? Will it make them faster? Different just cause you’re bored with the standard is not a good reason for change unless you’re making a toy.
Many many things have been explorer and discarded because they didn’t work. You developers see the status quo and think no one has tried anything else. People have tried tons of different things and they didn’t improve the situation so they were dropped. But if you don’t actually go and read the research and history you would never know.
Well, just that in my own tests, it seems pretty stable and fairly usable. They certainly have a lot of work to do, but I like the concept and I think that it will be pretty good by the time Gnome 3.0 is released. However, many people disagree, and hate Gnome Shell in general. I don’t really know how well it will do in the end.
Most people pay a lot more attention to the apps than the window manager (although I strongly disagree with the common statement that the OS isn’t important and should only exist for the users to use the apps).
And Plasma wasn’t the only problem in KDE 4.0. Many of the apps had huge instabilities too. Thankfully, Gnome 3.0 shouldn’t have that problem, at least with the apps.
I should have been more clear. I don’t think that the desktop needs a fundamental redesign. I’m just a little bit sad that so little attention is payed to it anymore. Phones, netbooks, and tablets are what is new and exciting right now, and there are certainly a lot of people who dismiss the desktop as old and something that only power users need anymore.
That’s not to say that there aren’t exciting new developments. KDE 4, Windows 7, Gnome 3 are all really nice. I just think that the rate of innovation is slowing. Overall quality is greatly increasing though.
True, but many more ideas have not been tried at all.
For one, developers are the ones who try the new ideas in software.
Also, many ideas have been tried but failed due to uncommonness, not merit. For example, attributes and queries in BeOS/Haiku are something that I would love to see on every OS. They didn’t “fail” because they were bad. They “failed” because few people use BeOS/Haiku.
Congratulations! You know how to jump down someone’s throat via the anonymity of the internet! You think your opinion means crap! You have the social graces of colicky, diaper-clad fuss-pot!
You’re special!
Well guess what? I can condescend, too.
By whatever measure the author chooses, smartass. I’ll pick a few for you, though: stability, rapid prototyping, community involvement, popularity.
But get this: Nobody’s gonna make you use Gnome Shell! Isn’t that crazy?! It’s actually a new piece of software. They’re giving you choice (stick with Metacity + Gnome Panel or try Gnome Shell). In fact, you could just as easily run Gnome with any window manager.
Novel, huh?
Of course, you know what this means: You’re bitching about nothing. Not nothing, even. You’re bitching about additional choice in an open source project (which is currently desperately soliciting direct feedback and contributions from the community) on a distant forum, far removed from the people who could or would care, and you don’t even have the courtesy to use a constructive tone. Ingrate.
If you should win the lottery, do you see yourself whining about the size of the check?
Leap to conclusions much?
Perhaps the desktop needs to be revolutionized because 40% of the screen real estate on my netbook is monopolized by redundant toolbars and rarely-used buttons.
Perhaps tabbed applications have finally made multi-tasking accessible and comprehensible to the masses, and they’re now ready to unite task management paradigms.
Perhaps pervasive search has rendered the classic “navigate to your document and double click” task flow irrelevant, wasteful, and unnecessary.
Perhaps there are more needs and opinions on these things than just your own.
“We developers” have every bit as much of a view of history as you (probably more, given your uninformed opinion thus far). Your reasoning is so circularly idiotic, I’m going to have difficulty explaining it to you without actually hurting my own intelligence in the process, but I’ll keep it bite-sized: Improvement necessarily involves change. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. By not changing, GNOME ceases to become technology and stagnates.
Or are you actually suggesting that technology is driven forward by… not changing anything? Because if that’s the case, you’re free to use (literally free) the existing versions of GNOME that work perfectly for you. Nobody’s twisting your arm to upgrade your free desktop environment.
KDE 4.0 didn’t fail, and it was actually very successful. It did exactly what the release announcement said it would do, no more and no less. Without an early release to give the application developers something to build on (that’s all KDE 4.0 was), then later releases like upcoming very solid 4.5 release wouldn’t have been possible. There were certainly communication problems, but that is a relatively minor thing compared with failing to deliver a new platform at all.
Anyone who thinks that new desktop environments will emerge just perfect all in one go, if only the guys working on them just follow the advice of the ‘armchair release managers’ on internet forums like this one, just don’t have a clue about how hard it is to develop a new desktop environment. I wish the Gnome guys luck, and hope they can keep their nerve in the face of the unjustified criticism like the KDE community has had to face from a small but vocal minority.
I completely agree with this. KDE 4.0 was fine for what it was designed to do. It was basically a technology preview. Sadly, a lot of package managers and users jumped on the release and tried to use it full time, which wasn’t at all what it was intended for.
People are already doing the same thing with Gnome Shell, downloading it and running it and complaining it isn’t good enough. But it isn’t due for its official release for about another six months.
It’s great to try new tech and give the developers (KDE or Gnome) some feedback, but people shouldn’t publically whine about beta code not being perfect.
First, let me just say that I love KDE right now. I used Gnome until KDE 4.3, but now KDE is just awesome.
True. When I said it failed, I meant that it wasn’t really useful for normal people to use, and thus, it was a failure to them. I understand that it was necessary for the progress of KDE, and I don’t think that KDE did anything wrong with the release (although labeling it as “alpha” might have helped a bit).
The people at fault were the ones who expected it to be perfectly ready and usable (which included me at the time, after trying KDE 4.0, I expected to be sticking with Gnome for a long time, and now, I would hate to ever go back to Gnome).
Calling kde 4.0 successful is outrageous.
Please justify that statement. I’ve been a software developer for a long time, and in my opinion KDE 4.0 and the follow up releases have been one of the most successful innovations in the last 30 years.
I’m speechless.
The Gnome shell is likely to be a boon for KDE. Just look at youtube comments of the previews, people are talking about switching to KDE and it hasn’t even been released.
It look like early mockups for the KDE4 NetBook shell
http://a.imageshack.us/img231/774/image146112.png
http://a.imageshack.us/img812/6196/mocsoc0918.png
But scaled up to be used on the desktop. I don’t think this interface will scale well, but I hope so. I am currently prototyping those mockup using the Awesome Desktop Shell prototyping framework (AwesomeWM). I will see how it work, I may use those concepts if it work well. After all, I have never been a great fan of the current standardized desktop UI.
I don’t even think the netbook edition should exist.
It isn’t as if KDE takes up that much screen space and most people would prefer the familiar interface.
The classic UI don’t work with touchscreen, the NetBook one does. As I have a touchscreen on my netbook (those 30$ addon touchscreen layer you can find for most popular netbooks), I enjoy having a touch friendly interface.
Linux/GNOME for decades has been trying to copy windows and Mac user interfaces. I actually like to see that they are finally going on their own tangent. I could move Linux to being it’s own OS not a clone of Unix, Windows, OSX.
Get a grip of reality….
I think the developers of both GNOME and KDE should get a grip of reality. If they keep heading the current direction, Linux desktop will stay stagnant as it has been for the last 15 years. Between GNOME 1.x and KDE.1x and their latest counterparts, I see 0.1% improvement. Things always not behaving one would expect, broken apps, sluggish windows…even things as simple as copy/paste and drag&drop are misbehaving.
The Linux Desktop is a desktop created with parts of multiple desks sticky taped/glued together. That is all. A big pile of useless stuff. Each part is incompatible either with itself or with the part next to it.
For once, *stop* re-inventing the wheel because you always end up making it square and start fixing the basics.
Edited 2010-08-01 09:41 UTC
Linux always seems to be in a “that will be fixed in the next release” loop. They get one part to be stable and some other thing is put in that is half working.
When the next Gnome Shell comes out, it will be 2 years before it is stable. By then some new printing subsystem will be put in that “just needs” to fixed a bit.
Have you ever tried KDE 4.4? If not, please stop complaining.
And if you don’t like Linux, don’t use it. Leave everyone else alone.
I tried KDE 4.4. The notifications occupied half of my screen for no reason at all. You plugged this in, your computer’s sleeping, your battery is full, compositing is enabled, compositing is disabled, track changed. What’s worse is the stupid Recent notifications feature that SHOULD NOT be displayed if there are ZERO recent notifications. Yes, I know the notifications can be disabled, but it is not ideal at all.
And don’t get me started on the abysmal performance of KWin with the binary NVIDIA drivers. Compiz works fine, KWin doesn’t.
Maybe I should try 4.5
We are running out of options. First kde was gone, now gnome is threatened.
Xfce
Edited 2010-08-01 13:18 UTC
Oh, just like how I dont see any difference between Windows 95 and 7.
That’s because even Windows 95 met and exceeded all of the computer basics – something KDE and GNOME can only dream of at their current state. I’d pick Windows 95 anytime over the latest KDE and GNOME – especially Windows 95 with IE4 desktop update. The UI is neat and professional with professionally sized widgets (unlike GNOME’s gigantic buttons – 4 buttons and nearly quarter of the screen is taken), spaces between icons and widgets equally aligned, dragging files to applications behaves properly, copy&paste works 110% of the time unlike KDE/GNOME, dragging icons to the taskbar works and behaves properly. Even the Office 95 quick launch bar is more user friendly and works better than KDE and GNOME’s panel (adding shortcuts via drag and drop).
Yes, the OS itself was crap but the desktop experience and behavior is great.
Only yesterday I tried out the latest KDE and I dragged a text file shortcut to the panel and instead of showing me the text file’s real icon, an icon with a preview of the desktop is shown instead. I was actually lucky I managed to add the icon to the panel. I tried adding a second icon and I couldn’t do it. No space for the new icon was created….Go figure…
Then there is this stupid option letting you add the text file is a mini editor on the panel. Seriously, how can you come up with these stupid ideas is beyond me. If you do it this way, at least do it properly because the way it is currently implemented is an absolutely absurd and useless.
Edited 2010-08-02 08:49 UTC
Call me ignorant, but I don’t understand what is meant by “Shell”, in regards to the UI.
Is there no Shell in the current version of GNOME (2.whatever)?
Is the shell optional? Will it come by default? I kind of like the simplicity of GNOME.. this new thing seems to go against what I like…
The shell is what is around the main working area (the active window). Having no shell = having only the window, not even a Window manager bar or panel, just the window.
The Gnome2 shell is composed of Gnome-panel, nautilus-desktop and Metacity. KDE one is composed of Plasma and KWin. Gnome3 have un unified shell for everything.
Use an OS with a “startmenu” type setup? Gnome shell is a startmenu that will also allow you to manipulate the desktop as well as open apps and desktops. It also has the added bonus of not covering up windows all ready open.
It’s pretty much just a cool looking overlay for something we all use on a daily basis. In GNOME fashion it’s hardly adventurous at all and i like it.
Personally, I subscribe to the school of thought “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” With that, I ask why do we need Gnome shell? Was there something wrong with the current Gnome desktop metaphor? Of course I support advancing the GTK framework and adding new functionality, transparency, speed, stability, etc., but do we need the entire desktop reinvented? I’m currently using KDE after using Gnome for a few years and I never use the “activities” feature of that desktop. I suspect a lot of users don’t. Considering the outrage that occurred when KDE made such a seismic shift, I hope the Gnome devs know what they’re doing.
Yet if you don’t change anything, how can you ever improve?
None of the modern desktops are perfect, after all. Gnome and KDE both have their flaws, as do Windows 7 and OS-X. And while you can work behind the scenes to improve memory and CPU use, you’re not going to fix the bigger problems that way. So why not try doing something different?
I agree. Common users are not looking for amazingly “advanced” looking new kind of GUIs but something familiar looking that makes work easy, is light on system resources, and doesn’t look all bad either. On the other hand, I have a hunch that many OSAlert readers would like to see big changes in the Gnome interface just for the sake of change, because they are geeks who want to try new things, and don’t like it if their pals have toys that look shinier and newer than the toys they use.
See title.
These are better:
http://www.webupd8.org/2010/07/new-gnome-shell-mockups-look-like-un…
The only way they can solve the problem of the GUI on Linux is to have sufficient integration along with things actually working.
When I last used Linux on a regular basis was two years ago, it got really annoying because of glitches and that I couldn’t get stuff done as easily as even on Windows.
Finally, I switched to a mac had didn’t have any problems since then. I really do hope some group can get this integration thing going, because I remember Windows 3.1 working more smoothly than some of these Linux distros.