Ubuntu Dust theme: an update

Commenter aescnt replied to my extended review of Dust, a proposed new look for Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex or future releases, to point out that updates to the theme have been released that address some of my past criticisms. I reinstalled Murrine, which I had embarrassingly neglected to do before my extended review, and slapped on the new Dust release. This was around ten days ago, and I’ve been so busy for the last fortnight that I failed realise I have been using, and enjoying Dust for all that time. If nothing else, this proves that Dust has gone from being a patchwork prototype to a coherent, functional look.

The verdict? Vastly improved. I really, really like this theme now.

Let’s look at the major changes. The min/max/close window controls were my major bugbear with the old look:

Small, fiddly and ugly. Yuck. Now, they’re larger, better integrated with the theme and produce a cool ‘glow’ effect when you hover over them:

The second major flaw with the old Dust was contrast. No matter how I tweaked things like transparency, my LCD monitor’s brightness and contrast settings, the system fonts and even the wallpaper, everything was still impossibly dark and I found myself squinting just to open Gnome menus. No more. Maybe it’s because of Murrine, or because of tweaks to the theme itself, but my eyes are much more comfortable with the new Dust and I can pick out text on window titlebars and Gnome panels with ease.

The ‘new’ Dust includes some extra bonuses. The long-promised Firefox theme has been released, tweaking the browser’s look and feel into line with the rest of the system without the previous text/background colour clashes. Although it’s not perfect – the tabs particularly look a little too Star Trek – it’s a major improvement that helps Dust to integrate into the GUI rather than stand awkwardly against it:

Nautilus, too, has been brought into line. The changes are subtle but the clashes between different elements (such as the grey statusbar with near-black resizing handle) have been smoothed out into a pleasing, unified look:

Dust comes packaged with a neat little script which adds some Compiz-powered drop shadows and other effects I would never have thought of using but which look really great, especially under tooltips and the Gnome panels:

I’ve had a little problem installing the Dust theme a few times now: when I try to install it through System > Preferences > Appearence, I get an error message “Can’t move directory over directory”. The only solution I’ve found for this so far is to remove all Dust-related folders from my ~/.themes directory, then installing the them normally. Apart from that, Dust delivers a near flawless experience.

One other theme-related item: check out these comments from Adam and marianomd for some advice on snazzing up the system fonts.

Credit again to sandman for the excellent wallpaper photo.

How-to: fix pulseaudio bugs in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron

Audio was one of the weakest points of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy, with the PulseAudio ‘upgrade’ seeming to cause more problems then it fixed. One of the constant bugbears on my system was that when more then one application producing an audio stream – say, Firefox open to a YouTube video and VLC – were open simultaneously, audio would often cut out altogether and require a reboot to restore it. I tried out psyke83’s how-to which adds tweaked PulseAudio, ALSA and Flash packages backported from the upcoming Intrepid Ibex 8.10 release. It worked great and I havn’t had a single audio (or Flash for that matter) glitch since! Props to psyke83.

Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” announced

Jaunty Jackalope? It may sound like furry porno but Mark Shuttleworth’s slightly eccentric announcement promises some interesting new directions for Ubuntu 9.04. First up is boot time, which has long been a pet peeve of mine in Gutsy and Hardy. There’s nothing that takes the shine off your favorite distro like watching it place a poor second against Windows in the startup event.

The Jackalope is known for being so fast that it’s extremely hard to catch, and breeds only when lightning flashes.

I’m a little confused about the significance of the second part, but the sentiment is good. Shuttleworth also mentions tailoring 9.04 for speed on specific devices. I’ll probably never see my dream of Ubuntu-based firmware for my old iPod touch; this more likely refers to subnotebooks shipped with customised versions of 9.04 as well as embedded devices.

Jaunty will also emphasise increased web integration into the desktop. Since “Jackalope” is apparently not sufficient to meet the awkward portmanteau quota, we are at this point introduced to the ugly “weblication”. This is a logical extension of the “pervasive internet access” slated for Intrepid Ibex. It’s going to be interesting to see what the developers come up with here, since this is the first application-centric major goal we’ve seen in a few releases. Google’s new Chrome browser has been stirring up a lot of talk about web based applications for no reason I can clearly discern: it’s certainly a great browser with a lot of potential, but beyond the improved Javascript handling and Gears integration it doesn’t offer anything particularly unique. I would be very surprised to see it become a part of Ubuntu any time soon, especially as there is still no linux port of the beta, although Google’s close ties with and support for Canonical could lead to some surprises.

More likely for Jaunty is a range of synchronisation services, some of which will be tethered to Google’s cloud. Given the increasing staleness of OpenOffice, we might even see Google Docs become the default office suite in 9.04. A revamp of web-integrated Gnome screenlets to be enabled by default is also a possibility, although this would be a fairly minor improvement. What excites me more is the possibility that entirely new weblication (ugh) systems will be dreamed up and implemented by the developers. This would be a boon in so many ways: it would lend some substance to the vaporous “web OS” paradigm; it would establish a hallmark feature to set Ubuntu clearly apart within the linux world and attract new users from without, something that has been sorely missing from the distro so far; and it would force web developers to take notice of the linux user base and push the spread of web standards. All good things.

Extended review of the Ubuntu Dust theme

(New readers: don’t forget to check out this updated review of Dust)

Last week I wrote a slightly scathing mini-review of Dust, a new Ubuntu theme which has gathered quite a following keen to see it included in November’s Intrepid Ibex release. After the review attracted some vehement disagreement, I decided in the interest of fairness to give the theme a solid test run. The conditions I set myself were simple: if, with the same amount of tweaking and customisation I would put into my own desktop, I could get Dust looking good on a test desktop, I would humbly eat my words. Here’s the setup I came up with.

Wallpaper: It obviously had to be something orange-red, or at least dark brown. I played around typing ‘africa’ and ‘desert’ into Flickr, but all the photos were either too dark or too monochromatic to contrast sufficiently with the dull Dust panels. Eventually I settled on this great shot which seems almost custom-made for Dust. I especially like all the limpid, crystalline elements: the metal sign, the railway tracks, the glassy blue sky. High praise and credit to the photographer.

Icons: This was a tricky choice and I’m not very happy with the outcome. The icon set is Docang via this Flickr user’s own Dust desktop. I’m probably just in a picky mood, but the shutdown icon from this set really bugged me and I tried several times to change it before giving up out of frustration. The desert icon set was a close runner up and I wouldn’t mind using it in a future desktop.

Transparency: This was another tricky decision, which comes back to Dust’s fatal flaw: it’s so dark. I love dark, but pulling off the combination of dark and usable is a tricky feat and Dust just doesn’t hold up. The gnome panel labels were very hard to read at full opacity, but I had to tone them down a little to avoid the desktop becoming “midwestern railway crossing, as seen from inside of postbox”. I ended up on 92% opacity. I thought that my difficulty in reading the panel menu text might be a result of my monitor settings, the wallpaper itself, or even my system font, but any attempts to tweak it better just made things worse. I decided not to apply any transparency to nautilus windows. Ubuntu’s default ‘glassy titlebar’ on unfocused windows actually looked quite good with Dust. Nautilus is definitely one of Dust’s strengths, although the grey statusbar with dark window resizing handle is a jarring combination.

Panels: Given the overall squintiness of Dust (more on that later), it seemed like a bad idea to contract the desktop down to my normal single-panel configuration.

Fonts: I would greatly appreciated it if somebody could show me how to improve upon Ubuntu’s default fonts. My efforts are consistently dreadful. The default fonts are bearable with most themes, but looked quite out of place with Dust. I couldn’t seem to emulate the look of the fonts in the author’s screenshots either, which are quite good.

The verdict: I appreciate that Dust is a work in progress. However, I stand by my original review: it really isn’t that impressive. Dust could best be described as squinty. You are forced to squint to read any text on the panels; squint to see if your mouse is lined up over the emaciated maximise\minimise\close buttons and to click them; and the overall dark-on-dark colour scheme seems to suck light away from the rest of your desktop. Intrepid Ibex can do better.

Ubiquity, Mozilla’s new command-line tool, is the future of Firefox and the internet

In the days after Firefox 3 was released, I thought something like this:

“Well, that’s about it. They’ve solved all the memory hogging issues, tweaked tabbed browsing to as good as it’s going to get, and added a few little touches like a decent bookmark manager. Sure, the awesome bar is awesome, but there really isn’t anything Mozilla could add to this that would improve browsing without getting in the way. I guess the future for Firefox will be keeping up with the latest standards, and maybe restyling the interface every now and then.”

Turns out I was dead wrong. Ubiquity, although only in a barest of bare-bones alpha release, proves that there is still a vast untapped space of cooler and shinier – not to mention faster and more powerful – ways of interacting with the internet.

Ubiquity is a text command tool not dissimilar from quick launching utilities like Quicksilver or Gnome-do, but with a vastly greater power and integration into the web. Quick launching tools tend to act as intermediaries: they take your command, figure out where you want to go and send you there. Ubiquity is more butler than messenger. You can highlight a section of text and tell Ubiquity to translate it into French, then tell it to email that same section of text to a friend. You can look up a term in Wikipedia and do a word count on the article. Admittedly, these examples are not all that impressive or novel, and the current selection of commands is quite small. However, Ubiquity includes a simple authoring tool and language which lets you create and share custom commands to do pretty much anything. Cool.

After I installed Ubiquity for a test run, the first thing it asked me to do is map a keyboard shortcut to call it into focus. I chose ctrl + spacebar and happily started testing. I spent a few minutes looking through the list of commands (accessible by telling Ubiquity “command-list”), playing around with them and trying to see how many I could use in the course of some normal browsing. I quickly realised two things: firstly, ctrl + spacebar is a very awkward shortcut, and secondly, the need for having a shortcut at all was not entirely clear. If you type a string of text while browsing, most of the time it will just float off into the ether. It’s rare that you would have a text box or some other kind of input selected. Moreover, a lot of Ubiquity commands act upon text you have grabbed with the mouse, which automatically means any text input into the keyboard will go nowhere fast. So why can’t Ubiquity accept text input without calling the command line first? Interacting with Ubiquity doesn’t have the same feel as interacting with, say, the Linux command line, where there is no distinction between the command entry space and the output space. Ubiquity feels more like a utility that you have to call upon than a direct interaction with the browser.

The main flaw with Ubiquity is the same one that has confounded many of the previously mentioned quick launching tools, as well as pretty much any other piece of software that attempts to turn your unbounded input into useful action. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly unique about Ubiquity in the way it handles natural language commands, which make the eventual universal access dreamed of by its developers seem a little disconnected from the actual software. Without a well-implemented parser or a clear idea of how to subtly force users to make their input machine readable, the ability for Ubiquity to act upon natural language commands will be strictly limited by the foresight and contingency of the commands’ designs. When I first installed Ubiquity, I selected some text and told it to “translate into french”. It took the highlighted text and replaced it with the words “into french”. I tried “translate english into french” and got a similar result. When I read the dropdown menu the third time I typed “translate”, I saw it telling me to enter (text to translate), (to language) and (from language). Typing “translate this english to french” finally got me what I was after, but by this point the original text had long since been “translated” out of existence. Hardly intuitive.

All this having been said, Ubiquity is still a brilliant idea and a groundbreaking piece of software. If Mozilla makes this the centrepiece of Firefox 4 (or whatever it is going to be called), it will probably be their most significant contribution so far to the average user’s experience, not to mention a “into french” against Internet Explorer. Ahem, that’s a “coup de grâce”. They’re not quite there yet.

Ubuntu Dust theme: give me some advice

Because of the feedback on my minireview, and in the interest of honesty and trying out a new thing, I’m giving the Ubuntu Dust theme a spin on my main desktop. So far I’m still very underwhelmed, but I suspect this is mainly becaue I have not yet tweaked my way to the optimal set-up. Please share your own themes and convince me that Dust is all it’s cracked up to be!

Mnemosyne is one of the best open-source apps you’ve never heard of

Mnemosyne is da bomb. This is the closest thing humanity has ever had to sticking one of those Matrix cables into the back of your head and streaming info in on a broadband line. Sure, the GUI might not look quite that cyberpunk, but the functionality is all there.

The basic premise of Mnemosyne, according to its creators, is to combine a flashcard viewer with an algorithm that shows you exactly what you need to know at exactly the right time for it to get seared into your gray matter. True, the boilerplate about “spaced repetition” with its vague references to “memory research” and people with long European surnames sounds a little like pseudoscientific babble. Regardless, it seems to work, and damn well.

After viewing each card, Mnemosyne asks you to rate your recall on a scale of 0, “totally forgotten”, to 5, “remembered with ease”. If the card is a new one, it asks using you to rate how familiar it has become on the same scale. These ratings go into the magical black box of the algorithm, and cause the cards to pop up again after a certain period of time. A typical session might involve a good dose of cards you have learned recently but do not yet have entirely memorised, a sprinkling of older cards to keep them fresh in your mind, and five or so brand new cards which you will see several times during the session until you’re confident you have them for a few days. Learning ensues.

Mnemosyne has an interface to put a Spartan barracks to shame. Just below the surface, however, is a treasure trove of handy little features such as three-sided cards, easy categorisation, tweaks to the appearance of cards including a handy feature which blows up the size of foreign script, and more. Once you have used Mnemosyne for a while, you start to get the impression that the developers are heavy users of the program themselves: every time you think “gee, I wish there was a way to -”, you realise that a solution has already been implemented. If not, there’s a small family of plugins, and of course you can always write your own. Want to add a sound file for the pronunciation of some foreign vocab, or an image to identify? Easy. Import a tab separated or XML flashcards database from your old flashcards program? No problems. It also exports cards, which is handy for mobile card viewers like the iPhone’s iStudy.

The only real downside is that it takes a little while for your mind to ‘get’ working with Mnemosyne. If you’re dedicated to learning your content motivation should get over this hump easily. Otherwise, it is easy to see how somebody giving this app a 10-minute test run could dismiss it as a lightweight flash-card flasher and nothing more. It’s not.

Mnemosyne is downloadable for Linux, Windows and OSX. It’s also available in the Ubuntu universe repository.

Minireview: Ubuntu ‘Dust’ theme

This theme has been getting a bit of attention on Digg today. I don’t like it. ‘Visually neutral’ does not have to mean ‘less exciting than your dad’s favorite tie’. The grey of the window background is too dark against the titlebar, although it does make a nice contrast with the text entry box. The close button, circular, dark and small, is playing too hard to get. The tango icons integrate well but that’s not saying much. I like the alternating white and grey lines in list view but they add only function, not visual appeal. The glassy gnome panels are a definite win – why was that look not applied consistantly across windows as well? I feel I’m being too harsh on this design, but perhaps it’s more an expression of confusion over the hype.

Bleg: what do you use the tracker search tool for in Ubuntu Hardy?

One of the first things I do when configuring a fresh Ubuntu distro is disable all the tracking, indexing and search daemons I can find. I’ve simply never had a need for a search and indexing tool in any OS. Yet, they are enduringly popular and often trumpeted as killer features. What do people use them for? Is there some way of using them that I’m yet to get my head around, but which greatly improves usability and efficiency?

Slick Ubuntu Desktop

It’s very frustrating to see a picture or video online featuring a really gorgeous Ubuntu\Gnome desktop, and have absolutely no idea how to get the same thing for yourself. Purely out of the goodness of my heart, and perhaps just a tiny little bit out of a desire to peacock, here’s a breakdown of my own desktop.

Wallpaper: I was searching on flickr for some images of DNA when I stumbled across this shot of a sculpture in Munich. Apparently when you see the it from the right angle it resembles a double helix. I love how the dark glossy metal complements the black of the top Gnome panel, and the orange-blue contrast is fantastic too. Here’s another great shot of the same sculpture.

Icons: black-white 2 gloss. There are several variations in the black-white family but this one fits in best with the black-glossy theme. For linux n00bs like me who struggled to add new icons the first time round, type sudo nautilus /usr/share/icons/ into a terminal then drag in the uncompressed folder called black-white_2-gloss. The icons will then be available in System > Preferences > Appearance > (select a theme) Customise > Icons.

Theme: ColorBit 2. To install, open System > Preferences > Appearance then just drag the compressed file into the ‘Theme’ box. Go to Customise > Colours then tone down all the blues to white\grays – this took a bit of trial and error on my computer and it’s largely a matter of taste how dark or light you want to take it.

Compiz: I’d love to use alpha-blur behind the semi-transparent windows but my graphics card just can’t hack it. Set the following opacity settings in System > Preferences > Advanced Desktop Effects Settings > General Options > Opacity Settings (if you can’t see Advanced Desktop Effects Settings, you don’t have the compiz settings manager installed; sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager):

class=Gnome-panel; opacity 82

class=Nautilus; opacity 90

class=File-roller; opacity 80

Go back to the CompizConfig Settings Manager main window, and go into Animations (it’s under Effects). Change the close effect to Burn with a duration of 50, and open to Skewer with a duration of 200.

Panels: To save space, I removed the bottom panel and put all the necessary bits and pieces up along the top of the desktop. Right click on panel objects to move or remove them; if you can’t, just untick the ‘Lock to Panel’ box and try again. Get rid of the ‘Show Desktop’ button and the ‘Switch Desktop’ applet – if you want to switch desktops, just drag a window off the side of the screen, or use <Ctrl> + <Alt> + an arrow key. Move the window list from the bottom panel up onto the top panel, and slide it along until it’s taking up the maximum amount of real estate. Now you can delete the naked bottom panel entirely.

That’s it! Don’t forget…the point of free software is that it’s free, so take advantage of that and use your imagination rather than copying my set-up exactly.