Desktop UI and Newbie Help Improvements
Posted by xipietotec on July 5, 2007
This is just a short writeup on things I think could be done to both improve the UI of the linux desktop and also provide better help to complete newbies. First I’ll give you a look at my gnome-panel. I have it situated at the top of my screen, where the eye is naturally drawn to anyways.
I have no bottom “window switcher” panel, because I instead use a compositing window manager (Compiz-fusion), and an application called Avant Window Navigator. It’s quite superior to the standard window-switcher applet, and also can function as a dock-bar. Anyways, take a look at my panel:
You may be wondering what the “Start Button” is, it’s actually a program called Deskbar (I’ve just edited the icon file with my own icon)which in many many if not most ways is far superior to the standard category view style of “Application Menu” which happens to be the first icon after the start menu button. The advantage of the category view is that it’s good when you don’t really have any idea what you’re looking for, or what it’s called, in other words, when you just want to browse through your files. The disadvantage is that when you do know what you’re looking for, it’s slower than finding it via deskbar (especially since deskbar remembers the last dozen or so things you’ve done through it). What I percieve as a duplication of both effort and, to coin a term, “visual mindshare” is having to use two different applications to essentially do the same thing: quickly browse through my applications.
Instead what would be better is to have an alternate “category” mode for deskbar. It could be brought up either through Ctrl+clicking it, or alt+F4 (instead of the default alt+f3), this would bring up a view similar to the standard Main-menu category view.
Next, since I’ve taken to converting a few people to ubuntu I’ve taken to doing a couple of things to make their lives easier as new users. I usually leave a text file on their desktop with some very basic instructions of “what does what” and “how to do this” and “what not to do” essentially. This isn’t like the ubuntu guide, but rather a more basic explanation of what some of those strange sounding programs and such do. Another thing I do is immediately install a few Firefox extensions that will make their lives loads easier, as well as change the default UI somewhat. Have a look at my Firefox UI standard:
While I install about 18 extensions (Linkification, 3 for AdBlock Plus, the theme I use above, delicious, stumble-upon, tiny menu, Perma tabs, All in one sidebar (not shown), Download statusbar, FireFTP, Unplug, Down Them All!, Cute Menus SVG, Link Alert, Colorful Tabs, and Faviconize tabs), most of them address things I think are shortcomings in Firefox’s default UI. Permanent Tabs however, is there to make their lives much easier. I immediately create a few permanent tabs: Google Homepage, The Ubuntu Guide, and The Ubuntu Forums (which I create an account for them as well).
In the text file I leave on their desktop I also leave instructions on how to remove the permanent tabs…with a caveat to please read them first. I wish the Official Ubuntu Book was free to distribute in digital form, as It would be nice to just have that sitting on the desktop of every new ubuntu install as well.
In my next post I’ll write down (since I lost the version I had been using) a new “super newbie guide”.
