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 Channel Futures

Open Source


Five Usability Improvements in Ubuntu 10.04

  • Written by Christopher Tozzi
  • May 25, 2010

Recent Ubuntu releases have introduced major changes, including a new theme, a new application stack and–gasp–a new position for window buttons.  But Karmic and Lucid also included a number of tiny usability enhancements that you might not have noticed, but which are central to making Ubuntu a Linux distribution for human beings.  Here’s a look at five of them.

While no operating system is perfectly intuitive, Ubuntu gives its competitors a good run when it comes to usability.  Other Linux distributions, and proprietary operating systems, certainly do some things better than Ubuntu.  But all in all, I’m impressed with the attention to user-friendliness evident in Lucid.

Granted, many of these improvements are the work of upstream developers, and they’re not unique to Ubuntu.  But from the end user’s perspective, that doesn’t matter–and it shouldn’t.

Screenshot Utility

Traditionally, the Gnome’s screenshot application simply dumped an image of the current screen to a file on the desktop.  If you wanted to do something more complicated, like take the shot after a delay or capture only the current window, you had to call the utility from a terminal with the appropriate command-line arguments.  That’s hardly something non-geeks should have to do.

In Karmic and Lucid, different options for taking screenshots are available through a GUI.  This may not be a revolutionary change, but it certainly contributes to usability.

Syntax Highlighting in Nano

Need to edit a text file from the command line, but find yourself afraid of taking sides in the vi vs. emacs debate?  Avoid the issue entirely by using nano, the text editor of champions–or at least of people who, like me, can’t remember how to exit an application without having the necessary keystrokes conveniently specified at the bottom of the screen.

I always feel a little embarrassed to admit I’m a nano user.  In Ubuntu 10.04, however, the utility has become more legitimate for serious work by supporting syntax highlighting when editing source code, which goes a long way towards making me feel like I have a clue what I’m doing.  It also makes scripts a lot easier to read.

Archive Mounter

Mounting ISO images as if they’re actual CDs in your disk drive can be incredibly useful.  It also used to be fairly difficult, unless you were good at remembering the cryptic arguments that you needed to pass to “mount” in order to create a loopback  device.

In recent versions of Ubuntu, this has become a thing of the past, since ISO images can now be mounted simply by right-clicking on them and selecting “Open With Archive Mounter.”  What could be easier?  Maybe a less ambiguous and technical name than “Archive Mounter,” but now I’m nitpicking…

RAR Files

Speaking of archives, dealing with files compressed in the RAR format used to be a big hassle.  You’d need to download unrar and run it from the command line (or XArchive, but that gets little press).  Granted, RAR is a proprietary, sketchy, undocumented compression algorithm that no one should ever use, but that doesn’t mean no one does.

Refreshingly, Lucid comes with built-in support for extracting RAR archives.  As a bonus, it can all be done through the graphical interface of Gnome’s standard Archive Manager, although unrar is still available for those users who prefer the command line.

Better PDF Reader

Evince, the PDF reader that ships with Ubuntu, has always done a good job of fulfilling its mission of being “simply a document viewer” (as opposed to Adobe Reader, which is “simply a huge, bloated waste of resources that takes ten minutes to open.”  But I digress).  In Ubuntu 10.04, however, Evince sports a few new features that make it extra-usable, including a side pane containing thumbnails of each page.  You can also now invert colors in a document, just in case you ever feel compelled.

Conclusion

There is, of course, always more work to do on the usability front.  Until my computer can literally read my mind, it won’t be as intuitive as I would like.

Despite its lack of psychic acuity, however, Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04 clearly reflect a commitment to usability.  I look forward to seeing what the next release brings.

Tags: Cloud Service Providers Digital Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Open Source

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7 comments

  1. Avatar aikiwolfie May 25, 2010 @ 7:52 pm
    Reply

    Nothing wrong with Nano. I use Gedit and I’ve used Nano in the past when X11 first started causing problems for multiple graphics cards. Which is another problem that has been fixed in recent versions of Ubuntu.

  2. Avatar kwah May 25, 2010 @ 8:59 pm
    Reply

    9.04 here, I am sorry, but this article contains mostly faulty statements…

    1. In Karmic and Lucid, different options for taking screenshots are available through a GUI.

    – They were there for ages, just use Main Menu -gt; Accessories -gt; Take screenshot or appropriate shortcut on the panel instead of default PtrintScreen keyboard shortcut

    2. Syntax Highlighting
    – Can not say anything about this one though… Do not use nano.

    3. Mounting ISO

    – 9.04 has it for sure.

    4. RAR Files

    – Just install unrar, then Archive Manager (aka file-roller) will be able to work with rar archives

    5. PDF Reader
    – Thumbnails are also not “new”

    Please, look deeper for new stuff, I suggest to read carefully release announcements.

  3. Avatar vishnu May 26, 2010 @ 1:31 am
    Reply

    @kwah, You are right!!
    All these features are avaialable in older Ubuntus.
    Please correct this article and provide actual new usabilities.
    I do hope there are many other in there.

  4. Avatar Christopher Tozzi May 26, 2010 @ 2:04 am
    Reply

    kwah and vishnu: syntax highlighting in Nano and RAR support out-of-the-box are definitely new to Ubuntu 10.04. I thought the other three changes originated with Karmic, but thanks for pointing out that they were available earlier.

    Perhaps the post would have been better presented as a look at how Lucid compares to the last LTS, Hardy, in terms of usability, since Hardy did not have any of these features besides thumbnails in Evince, which I apparently noticed only now because it seems to be enabled by default in Lucid and I had it turned off before. Hardy also has the screenshot utility, but not with as many features.

    The larger point of the post is to elucidate the usability enhancements that have come to Ubuntu in recent years. Even if I was incorrect about the precise dating of some of these changes, observing them is still a valid endeavor, I think–especially if you remember how things were in the “old days,” when ISO images really could only be mounted from the command line, for example.

  5. Avatar walt May 26, 2010 @ 5:24 pm
    Reply

    I would like to comment on the the “feature” only briefly mentioned in the lead-in paragraph – new position for windows buttons.
    I doesn’t seem that anyone who comments on this feature has ever used a MacIntosh 🙂

  6. Avatar mocoloco May 28, 2010 @ 1:28 pm
    Reply

    @walt
    I use a Mac daily for work. Yet I hate the Lucid button placement, mostly because of menus. In OS X there’s not a chance of hitting the file menu instead of the close button. Plus the left side of Lucid windows look cluttered, like they’re going to tip over from all the “weight”. My $0.02.

  7. Avatar Koko May 28, 2010 @ 3:37 pm
    Reply

    What Ubuntu needs is a decent pdf highlighting tool like Okular, since Mendeley is proprietary and buggy. There are some alternatives but no simple and stable solution to the simple issue of pdf marking.

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