Mark Shuttleworth's ideas on the visual aspect of the next Ubuntu ...

A few days ago some were surprised to read that Shuttleworth intends to keep copying some visuals from your Mac, how to be the inclusion of a title bar within the GNOME panel, so as to «gain more vertical space». Now, apparently, the guys at Canonical continue to delve into that line and have thought replace the "gap" that has been left in our title bars, due to the shift of the window buttons to the left, with an "innovative" idea: the "windicators«.

"Window indicators", "windows indicators" or, to put it short, "windicators" are indicators located in the title bar of windows. Like the indicators in the GNOME panel they have an icon that shows their status and when you click on it, a menu appears. Applications can create, update or remove windicators using an API very similar to the AppIndicator framework which is very recent (since Ubuntu Lucid).

Bye to the status bar

Mark is of the opinion that simple is better. In terms of design, there is too much waste of vertical space in many applications. This is especially bad for those who use netbooks or laptops.

For example, it is very common for some applications to have status bars for no important reason. Typically, the status bar shows: some status icons (online, offline, etc.), some utilities (Yslow, etc.), and job messages ("Saving such a file ..").

We can replace these with a combination of windicators and temporary and overlapping status bars (in the style of Google Chrome).

If you are interested in this idea, you can participate in the Ayatana mailing list and join the design discussions that take place there. Mark y Cía. They are interested in developing patterns that are generic, so that common icons and possibly the same menu entries can be used to solve the same problems in various applications.

Some possible "windicators" for Ubuntu 10.10

• online/offline: status indicator and options to change status for mail clients, chat clients and social network applications (twitter, facebook, etc.).
• An indicator of “not saved", Which gives users to understand that the contents of the file they are working on has changed and allows them to save it or set the autosave properties.
• Progress indicators, that show the progress of an action, and possibly also indicate the extent of that progress. The associated menu would allow to pause or cancel the operation, and also define the action to be carried out when finished.
• An indicator "canasta", Which shows if any of the objects were selected for purchase.
• Share, an indicator that shows if a document is being shared with other people, and allows the user to configure with whom to share it.
• Volume, indicator that shows the volume of the audio streams of an application and that allows the user to configure the volume for each application.

All these indicators would be entirely specific to each application, and ideally only relevant to the window to which they belong.

Same as the indicators on the GNOME panel ...

From a design point of view, the goal would be for the windicators to be symbolic. This means that they would follow the same "style" as the current GNOME panel indicators:

• Monochromatic by default, with a silhouette indicating the function of the indicator.
• Semantic colorings: red means there is a serious problem, orange means an alert, green means a positive state, and blue means there is an informational message that needs the user's attention.

Integrated into the Smart Panel of the Netbook Edition

Last week, Mark mentioned that it is his intention for the Netbook Edition version of Ubuntu to adopt a single global menu for all applications, in the GNOME panel. Yes, Mac style. He also said that they will explore the possibility of putting both the window title and the menu on the panel, as long as the window is maximized. Of course that means the windicators will have to be accommodated as well.

So when a window is maximized, the smart panel will be used which will include both the indicators and the window title, and the windicators will be integrated into it as well. They will appear on the right in the panel, together with the indicators that we already know today, but to the left of them.

Here is a schematic so that you can see how Ubuntu will be in future versions.