Over the past two years, Ubuntu has introduced a suite of status menus — known to Ubuntu geeks as “indicators” — in the top corner of the screen.
In Ubuntu 12.10, we plan to refine these menus to address several long-standing problems. If you’re a programmer, tester, or visual designer, there are plenty of opportunities for you to help out.
In updating the design, our general theme has been improving relevance — showing menus, and items in menus, only when they are relevant to you. For example, if you never use a VPN, it shouldn’t take up space in the network menu. If you never use Gwibber, it shouldn’t take up space in the messaging menu. If you never use a Bluetooth device, you shouldn’t need to see the Bluetooth menu. And so on.
System menu
The biggest change to the structure, though, is a straightforward simplification. The two menus at the end of the menu bar, the user and system menus, will merge. As well as saving space, this will fix three main problems:
- “Switch User Account” and “Log Out” were in different menus, despite being closely related. Now, they’ll be in the same menu. (“Lock Screen” and “Switch User Account” will become one and the same command.)
- It’s been hard to find which version of Ubuntu you are using. This will now have a dedicated menu item.
- Finding the Ubuntu Help has also been difficult. That will now have an always-present menu item too.
One more detail. When Ubuntu used a home icon to represent the Nautilus file manager, usability testing found that people thought it was a launcher or starting point. (This isn’t surprising, given the strong connotations of Home in other applications.) The Unity Dash, meanwhile, is exactly that kind of starting point. So one possibility under discussion is changing the Dash launcher icon to a home icon — which the Dash already uses for internal navigation anyway.
How is that relevant to the status menus? It raises the possibility that we could use the Ubuntu logo, if it won’t be in the launcher, as the title of the system menu instead. We plan to test this against the powercog icon, and see which works better.
Clock menu
Many improvements can be made to the clock menu, but the design will remain much the same.
We’d like to add the ability to set a basic alarm, and if it’s set, this will be shown using an icon in the menu title.
If you’re a programmer and know your way around C and GObject, another simple enhancement would be populating the coming events section of the menu from a Web calendar, such as Google Calendar.
Sound menu
The sound menu design will remain unchanged in 12.10. As with the clock menu, though, there are plenty of minor improvements to work on.
Network menu
Ubuntu’s network menu is powered by Network Manager, and our design is a visual presentation of where we’d like to take it in future. It simplifies the current menu by using consistent on/off switches for connection types, removing needless separators, and showing less common functions — mobile broadband and VPNs — only if you have set them up in the Network settings.
Bluetooth menu
As with the network menu, we’d like to simplify the Bluetooth menu by using on/off switches and reducing separators.
Battery menu
The battery menu design will stay the same.
Messaging menu
We plan to simplify the messaging menu by removing the default Chat, Mail, and Broadcast items. Instead, messaging programs will show up only if you have set them up, and will show up under their own names. As well as shortening the menu, this will solve the problem that nobody knows what “Broadcast” means.
In Ubuntu for Android, the messaging menu will naturally expand to show missed calls, voicemail, and SMS messages.
And finally, Ubuntu One will at long last be banished from the messaging menu, moving instead to the menu next door…
Sync menu
The new Sync menu will be present if you use any services such as Ubuntu One, SparkleShare, or Dropbox, that carry out non-urgent synchronization over the network. (Continuing the relevance theme, the menu won’t be present at all if you haven’t signed up for any of those services yet.)
From this menu, you’ll be able to turn each service off and on — turning them off if you’re trying to download something in a hurry, for example. You’ll also be able to access their settings, if they have any.
Keyboard menu
We’d like to make two main improvements to the keyboard menu.
First, combining it with the input method menu. So that if you use input methods (such as for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean), you don’t have two separate menus for controlling your keyboard.
And second, making the menu title an icon that represents the current input method or keyboard layout, instead of a generic keyboard icon with added text. (Visual designers could help us here, in finding an elegant way to generate an icon based on the letter code for each layout.)
So long, printing menu, we hardly knew you
In Ubuntu 12.04, a printing status menu appears whenever any print jobs are in progress. Unfortunately, it’s not that noticeable.
So in 12.10, we plan to replace it with a temporary printing item in the launcher. This will correspond to a minimized window listing your recent print jobs. You can close it when done, or just ignore it, as you see fit.
What’s next
As these designs are fleshed out, the individual specifications will be updated in the ‘Unity Application and System Indicators’ section of The Toolkit.
This is a lot of work, and you’re welcome to help out if you can. Pop in to the #ubuntu-unity channel on IRC, or get in touch on the unity-dev@ mailing list.
Will the temporary printing item in the launcher be a real app that uses libunity or will it be a ‘virtual’ item, like the trashcan? (So will it appear in other launchers or task switchers?)
And this wasn’t thought of for 12.04 LTS because..?
LAZINESS.
Some of those switches will depend on either (a) moving things like nm-applet away from libappindicator, or (b) extending libappindicator to support more widgets. Which will happen?
Just to add that it will be nice to put in calendar settings: Sunday/Monday first day of the week option.
Thank you.
The old Gnome 2 Clock Menu is still better. I can set time zones, see the weather and much more. Sometimes I still use Gnome Classic _also_ because of that. Sounds stupid, but I need those features. The actual menu clock is really poor.
Using the same style that we have in the dash would be great. With Blur effect, some transparency, more icons etc.
One concern I have with the System Menu is the length. How will many user accounts be handled?
Frankly I don’t agree on the presence of “About this computer” and “Ubuntu help” in the system menu.
I recognize that those could be useful for an inexperienced user, but for an advanced one these are just unuseful informations in a very precious space.
It would be very different if instead of “About …” there were the actual ubuntu version number or codename (clickable for more) and a textbox to search rapidly in the ubuntu help
Oh, forgot to say: everything else is awesome!
Maybe you should think about those inexperienced new users? I think that finally Canonical think about them too.
Maybe because of dependencies related to Notification modules.
12.04 tagets stability more than anything while 12.10 targets features and ergonomics.
Technical considerations are to be listed with the arrival of Wayland for example.
Nevertheless, there is no shame in imagining a 12.04.1 version whith design improvements!
What do you mean by “set time zones”? If you select a location with a different time zone in the clock menu, it does change the system clock.
As for weather, have you tried indicator-weather?
Nice, looking forward to trying these out!
I am specially interested about the sync menu, since I also maintain a small PIM sync app that has an indicator. Will it be possible to merge it into the sync menu?
There is just one thing that I really miss from the (very) old layout: The me menu that merged IM status into the user menu. I am still not used to having IM status in the messaging menu, as this is not some communication, but rather user-related status. But this is probably very subjective.
My guess would be the latter ;-)
Geeks? Really? We’re your userbase, for Pete’s sake. Geez.
Anyway, all the things listed are really great improvements. Y’all are clearly being attentive to user needs and practical matters. I hope you extend this concern to other UI things, too!
I like this idea. Even if lots of countries start the week with Sunday, it effectively starts on Monday.
Great features I miss in Unity panel (menu bar or call it indicators region) are:
– Calendar scheduling.
The user should be able to set scheduled events and manage how their notifications are displayed (warnings, ..).
– Multimonitoring notifications support.
– Integration of weather indicator
– Ability to hide menu items like (About this computer / Ubuntu help). These menu items are great for new comers or non advanced users, but for an advanced user, only productive items count!
– The menus should be CSS customizable indepentently from a GTK CSS system wide base background color.
I would love to see UbuntuOne / Cloud services deeper integrated in Ubuntu. There is an old average user IT problem → http://xkcd.com/949/ (sharing big files)
and this idea could solve it:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-servers/+bug/969995
Will these improvements be back-ported to 12.04?
Do you mean transparency, with blurred background, for menus in general? Mac OS X tried that a decade ago with menus, and then later with the top-level menu bar. But in both cases it turned out not to work. For something as information-dense as a menu, there is no real crossover between “transparent enough to be interesting” and “opaque enough to always be readable”.
– Yes, the help item should be optional. (I’m hoping, that if one removes the relevant packages the menu item will just disappear.)
– You can modify the gtk3 gtkrc/css to have separate background color for the menus and the default window background. On 12.04 I created a mix of Ambiance and Radiance, where popup menus have the light background, but the panel, and the menus dropping down from the panel are dark.
No, Ubuntu 12.04 is in UI Freeze. Changing the UI will break translations and documentation. These are things to look forward to.
I disagree in removing the printer menu. I do not understand how a temporary Launcher item will improve its discoverability. And actually yet another Launcher item would annoy me in my netbook.
Thank you for posting, I’m excited to see these plans!
I hope you can provide more posts like this, showing what is upcoming, and the thinking behind it.
I have, and it would be a good candidate to be merged with the clock menu. That way to find out what the time/weather is in Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, Toronto all at once, I can look at one place. Right now, I have to set locations twice in two menus and then open up 2 menus back and forth to get the info. Do I need to have it in one menu? No. But it was logical/convenient to have the environment info in one place. I never realized how often I was looking for this information before, but now that it has changed I find it takes more than twice the effort and has become more of a chore…
I understand that it might be better without the weather as a default. But, and perhaps this a Canadian trait, I find I can obsess about the weather. Perhaps an option to turn it back on for people like me would be nice.
You can have multiple clocks in the clock menu. Just click Time & Date Settings. Switch to the Clock tab and select Time in other locations.
Also not keen on the idea of moving the printer to a Launcher item. A new icon appearing in the launcher will draw my attention to it unnecessarily, as if a new program has opened in the background that requires my attention.
Once I’ve clicked Print, my printer should start working. It doesn’t require any further action from me unless there’s an error (for which there should be a dialog or other notification), so it shouldn’t try and get my attention. It should be completely passive and doesn’t *need* to be noticeable.
“If you never use a Bluetooth device, you shouldn’t need to see the Bluetooth menu. And so on.”
I understand the reasoning and for the most part I agree with it. However, if you’re not careful about how you implement such ideas, you can make it hard for new users to find out about useful features.
P.S I’m not actually using Ubuntu on any of my machines. (Because Unity doesn’t work with my graphics card and Unity is Ubuntu’s greatest “selling point” for me.)
Agreed to this. We already have a message notification when doc is sent to printer and when printing is done so no need for an icon, UNLESS, there is a printer error, like paper jam, no paper, low ink or such.
I always wonder why there is a separate line taking up the sound menu for mute option … it would be very good if a mute icon button is placed at the left side of volume slider and a full volume icon at the right end of the volume slider . and the volume when muted suddenly goes off but when unmute gradually increases to the previous level.
Please think about it and do let me know where my idea has design wise problems for my better understanding of your design ideas.
And one more thing i want to say is the menu name should be at the bottom of the of the menu with say a bold font and not at the top. When clicked on menu name it should bring up the control panel for that menu item.
This could have been implemented much earlier. But anyway welcome changes… Ubuntu is heading the right way :)
I see a lot of menu centric design, while ubuntu is trying to get rid of menus #doubt
This looks great!
One question though. Will the Network menu also contain an on/off switch for proxy? Its a similar use case to the vpn switch. I for one always use them in conjunction…
This is a really good job, however, I miss a key lock status. I refer to something like indicator-keylock (by T. Scott Barnes) included in the keyboard menu. This will be really useful for those whose laptop does not have keyboard lock LEDs.
Thank you so much for your efforts.
Patches welcome.
Heh. Actually, much of it was thought of months or years ago. For example, the updated designs for the messaging and system menus are very similar to what I first sketched in November 2009. Similarly, the Bluetooth menu design matches a sketch from December last year.
But there’s a difference between what’s thought of and what’s designed in detail, a bigger difference between what’s designed and what’s approved, and an even bigger difference between what’s approved and what’s implemented.
The biggest limiting factor is always a lack of programmer-hours to implement things. So if you enjoy a lack of laziness yourself, please do help out.
There will be a sensible limit, and if there’s overflow you can use the lock/switch screen to scroll through all of them. It’s roughly the same approach as for wi-fi networks in the network menu.
I always say to myself “I will not update my setup until at least beta 2 of the next version is available”. Because of this kind of refinements (and as usual), I will update it immediately when it will be available :)
Integration of G. Agenda, basic alarms and sync menu are very good news to me!
My 2 cents:
– consistence between menu items and launched windows title (it’s not so with my french setup)
– a way to setup webmails in the messaging menu
– switch for “show time in menu bar” in the battery menu; btw, why not “show time” instead of “show time in menu bar” – where else? More: why don’t you remove this item finally? Is it relevant here? It this not a setup-and-forget thing?
– always use “settings” at the bottom of each menu (?)
– and “all settings” in the system menu (?) “system settings” is kind of scary for most users.
The designs look great Matthew! Can you tell me the reasoning behind the Messaging Menu order? I always thought that it was odd that “Chat” was listed under “Available” etc. instead of above them. “Broadcast” and “Mail” are used as headers or titles with sub lists under each of them. Also the fact that the availability icons in chat are in color when most other icons in the menus are mono.
I love the unification of keyboard layout & input method! Please do as fast as you can! :)
1) The switches in the network indicator will simplify it *a lot*. +1 for that.
2) Hooray for a sync indicator by default. I also like the idea that it integrates with Dropbox, et al.
3) Thoughts on printer icon in Dash. It was a bit annoying in the panel before; it should have been an indicator as well if it was going to be up there. An icon in the Dash will take getting used to for new users (same behaviour as on a Mac—not that I’m saying it’s being copied [I’ll leave that to others who care], but that it took getting used to when I first encountered it), but that doesn’t disqualify it. It will be a lot more discoverable and intuitive there.
However, I can also understand the viewpoint of the guys that don’t want something popping up extra on their netbooks. I wonder if it would be possible to automatically close it when all jobs are done printing (again, as on OS X); I don’t care about it, and shouldn’t have to, once my documents are printed.
Then the Quicklist Style will be great.
Ubuntu is becoming Pixel Perfect, Unity has a mordern look, but the way the menu are rendered is inconstenty, visually. we could use the Toolkit used to render the quicklist to render those menu.