Mark Shuttleworths response to left side button criticisms

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/mark-shuttleworths-response-to-left-side-button-criticisms.html

To follow up on the "New Look" Ubuntu thread.

 

Hm, I've read it and not get it. What's the problem?
I quickly put 10.04 in virtualbox just yesterday, but don't see anything specific about it ... gnome on desktop looks just like gnome anywhere else. I've got to say that this is my first *buntu i ever installed, so can't compare to older releases
So, what button they talk about?
to paraphrase IT crowd sitcom ....:
Hey, my PC has one glowing button on the side! And I know what THE button is and I also know about that *thing* under the table...what's the name ...oh, hard drive!! .... so I'm not from the past

 

im confused about this halo it's just a button they should focus on something worth the effort not just a button

 

The fact is that the button suffers from a few usability and design problems.

Firstly, there's that's Fitt's Law problem. The more bunched up the left it, the more time spend to navigate it. Another problem is that the order of them is weird. Min Max Close isn't an order that we use at all. It's as if Ubuntu decided to move them to the left to mimmick Apple, but didn't want people to say they're copying, so they swapped them for swapping sake.

For the design case, In Nautilus, everything will be on the left with 4 tiers of panels. The right is completely empty and it just looks unbalanced. OSX solves this by putting a unified menu bar at the very top, and visually it's balanced with the finder at the right. It looks elegant. Here it'll look lopsided. Shuttleworth mentions that he's only adding the feature in 10.10. Then he should move the buttons in 10.10 to give a unified look and THEN get opinions. This is premature and silly.