Ubuntu 10.10 Multitouch Support Demo

Timothy found a news report and a little video demonstrating the multi-touch capabilities of Ubuntu. It's attached below if you're curious what the new Unity Netbook UI is looking like these days.

That's great but...

[imgod2u]

One of the important UI changes about a touch-only interface is that things such as managing the filesystem, arranging folders and icons, etc. are too cumbersome to do in the traditional navigator window type of interface.

iOS just gets rid of it altogether whereas Android limits you to handling files via applications. Unless they've managed to come up with a proper auto-categorization and file organizer -- such that I don't need to go through folders to get to a media file I want to play -- this will still be a cumbersome desktop OS with a touch UI "layer" on top.

Re:But Linux on the desktop is dead.

[DrgnDancer]

Portables != Desktop. The article you're referring to also makes a point of pointing out how *well* Linux is doing on portables. This device is more closely related to an iPad than a desktop. That said I have several questions the video doesn't answer. Does this device have a physical keyboard or a virtual one. If it's got a physical KB then they did a fantastic job of hiding the thing while it wasn't being used. If it's got a virtual keyboard I'd really like to see it up as part of the video. Just to get an idea for how much screen real estate it uses and such.

I've been considering an iPad. Honestly this looks nicer (at any rate more open, which is more important to me on a tablet than a phone), but I'd want to see a lot more than a couple muti-touch gestures to be sold. He really only demonstrates two gestures, mostly he spends the whole video using a single finger to simulate a left-click on static objects. Hardly revolutionary. Can it do pinch zoom? Two finger scrolling or one finger? Will two fingers simulate a right-click? (It's a mostly desktop OS, so unlike in iOS right clicking is probably pretty useful). I'm sure I could find out the answers, but if you're going to make a promo video for "multi-touch" show me some "multi-touching".

Re:Touchscreen keyboard?

[WrongSizeGlass]

That video had an awful lot of editing ... and some 'instant response' from the device ... almost like the commercials for iDevices & Droids on TV. It would have been nice to see a longer video with the actual response times for everything. I'm just sayin'

Re:That's great but...

[Anonymous Coward]

File managers work fine on the n900 (default or Filebox). Just limit the feature set of the file manager to avoid complicating the interface and you are good to go. Its no more difficult to tap your way down a folder system than it is clicking your way.

  For most user cases Tracker or the application will be good enough.

Re:That's great but...

[Nadaka]

A meta data tagging system combined with search should work wonders for organization, if only people would actually tag their files so they can find them later.

Auto categorization has sever limits, it can distinguish between file type, do keyword search on known text files and possibly use face recognition to distinguish between scenes and portraits or gps meta data to filter photos by location, but anything more than that is going to be impossible. It is impossible because it not only requires strong AI, but because it requires strong AI that knows how you would categorize things.

Re:Patent Violations Galore

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much any computational device with a power on/off button violates one or the other patents from Apple. After all, everything that exists today in computer/phone technology is pretty much invented, patented, copyrighted or trademarked by Apple.

CAPITALISM FTW, BITCHES!!

Re:How about more info for us drooling noobs

[jc42]

Funny you should phrase it that way; my main thought while watching the video was "This is a true point-and-drool interface".

It wasn't until the very end that there was a brief glance at a screen that hinted at the existence of some sort of keyboard somewhere. But that didn't last long enough to scare the keyboard-averse, who are presumably the intended audience.

I also noticed a curious line around the edges that make it look like one of those screens that rotates and flips to hide a keyboard on the inside of the other half. Does this gadget have a physical keyboard hidden inside? Or, alternatively, does it open up to show a second keyboard on the other half?

Maybe I should just visit Dell and see if they have any actual info about it. But that might be too close to RTFA, so maybe I shouldn't admit here to every considering doing such a thing.

Re:Awesome

[element-o.p.]

That happens, regardless of OS (except maybe Mac, but that's only because they strictly limit the hardware that OS-X runs on...). I've had the same problem with drivers that you described when installing Windows on various machines -- my wife's old XP desktop a few years ago, the Win2K3 server I built recently (and that required a freaking *FLOPPY DRIVE* to install 3rd party RAID drivers, sigh...). Sometimes Windows has the right driver built in, sometimes Linux does.

Unity sucks on netbooks

[a_nonamiss]

I will say from experience that Unity sucks a big fat one on netbooks. I'm not talking about old netbooks, either. I just bought a brand new HP Mini 210 and an Acer AO532h Both have an Atom N450, which isn't the fastest processor in the world, but Unity runs like a slideshow on both of them. It's supposed to be a distribution optimized for netbooks. The dock is almost unusable because of the lag, and it launches apps slow as hell. The 10.04 netbook interface was much faster and more responsive. Sure Unity is (or could be) slick and pretty, but the netbook remix isn't supposed to be about slick and pretty. It's supposed to be about fast and easy performance on sub-standard hardware.

I think at this point it might be entirely appropriate to separate the netbook distro from a tablet distro. Tablet PC's have substantially more horsepower than netbooks, the two projects have completely different goals. Why have them in a single distro? On my netbook I ended up hacking in the old netbook interface and it works great, but what I did is out of the reach of most people that the Ubuntu community is trying to attract. If they could get this OS on $250 netbooks from Wal-Mart, maybe the general public would realize that Linux doesn't suck, and isn't hard to use. I shouldn't need to re-compile my kernel to figure that out.