Ubuntu 10.10 Multitouch Support Demo 104
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.
Nifty (Score:3, Interesting)
That's pretty good so far. Hopefully we can configure the icon bar on the left to hide by default the same way you can hide the task bar on any desktop. Speaking of the task bar, how is task switching accomplished on this thing? I may have missed it in the video. Is there a gesture that does the same thing as Alt-TAB?
My biggest concern, what happens when you want(yes, want) to use the terminal?
Touchscreen keyboard? (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing that wasn't mentioned in the article text or accompanying video that I am curious about, how does text input work? When a text bar or area is activated does it bring up a keyboard?
Re:But Linux on the desktop is dead. (Score:1, Interesting)
Didn't you see him pick up the computer in the video? No desktop needed. This is about post-desktop computing.
Tabs, not windows (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it looks great, but I can't help but think that using application windows like on a regular desktop is maybe a step backwards for multitouch tablet devices. Sure, people are familiar with opening and maximizing or minimizing windows, but the buttons for such windows are small compared to the rest of the screen and hard to hit with clumsy fingers (especially mine). It's nice that the Unity desktop has the vertical launch bar on the left side - could this launch bar not be modified to function almost as a tab bar for open applications? That'd be much easier, I think, for touch and gesture based devices. Or, even better, use the Expose style overview mode to switch between windows (as shown in the video) rather than allowing the user to reshape and manipulate windows directly.
Re:Best looking dead OS I've seen (Score:2, Interesting)
How about bitching about it once they have it finished?
Re:But Linux on the desktop is dead. (Score:3, Interesting)
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".
From the article:
One of the coolest things though is one that will be experienced by the fewest people at this point – touch. Unity is fully touch-enabled – those big icons are screaming out to have a digit poked at them. But as ever, the boys in the lab, or in this case Duncan McGregor‘s multi-touch team have gone a step further and created a multi-touch ‘gesture’ library. This allows finger combinations to do groovy things like expand and reduce windows, pull up multiple windows in one workspace, and call up the ‘dash’ automatically. These are in 10.10. In 11.04 we will see a lot more.
So I'd say, no, it doesn't have more than just what they demonstrated
At least not yet. But you'll probably have a lot of them delivered by, interestingly enough, Natty Narwhal (which is odd because Narwhals don't look like they'd be too interested in multitouch).
Given that I'm sure the multitouch library will expand even more significantly for 11.10, I'd like to make a suggestion for the name: Omnipotent Octopus.
New ubuntu user here (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently got an Asus EEE (1001px) netbook as a gift, and it came with Windows 7 starter. Now, I use windows 7 at home (ultimate) and I don't dislike it, but I was very unhappy with starter. You can't even change the background image, I mean, what the fuck.
Anyways, I used to use linux (I mean, like 10 years ago when I was in highschool I used to use debian and slackware), but haven't really since. I decided to try ubuntu so I did a USB installation and put 10.10 netbook edition. I have to say, it was just as easy (if not easier) than a win7 installation (which I have to do often), and is WAY better on a netbook.
I think people who say linux is popular on portables are exactly right. It's an awesome fit, and I love it.