TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Blog Fodder: Why, Ubuntu, Why?

So Ubuntu is moving even further to becoming nothing more than a Mac clone on Desktop UI looks, and that annoys me to no end. First it was the purple, then it was the moving of the close-expand-minimize buttons to the opposite side of the window, and now they want to copy the most idiotic of all UI designs: a global menu taskbar that each application steals focus for when it's open.

It's just so insanely stupid of a UI, sorry Mac users.

This rant by "Goat Jam", from this comment thread, provides my complete opinion:

Some annoying Mac acolyte wrote;

"a menu bar at the top that sort of looked like a Mac's menu bar but wasn't specific to the active application (what good is it then?)"

Detached, application specific menu bar. Ugh. That has got to be the single most user unfriendly, unintuitive and godforsaken abomination to ever be designed into a UI and I have no idea why so many kool-aid gulping mac fanboys bang on about it like it is the best thing since sliced bread.

The only thing I can think of is that mac users are those sort of knob ends that run every window maximised and get all confused if they have more than one app open at a time. That might have something to do with the lack of multitasking in macs before OSX came along but I suppose it would make some sort of sense because the top menu bar is always the menu bar for the active window which doesn't really matter if ALL YOU CAN SEE ON THE SCREEN IS THE ACTIVE WINDOW!

But, consider for a moment that you are not such a retard and you actually use a computer with multiple windows open (like a do) and you pretty soon realise that when you are working in a window on the bottom RHS of your screen THE LAST THING YOU WANT TO DO IS MOVE YOUR VISUAL AND MOUSE FOCUS RIGHT ACROSS TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN every time you want to access the fricking menu.

Even worse is if your primary focus is Window A but you want to access the File menu on non-focussed Window B, whats that you say? I have to click on Window B and THEN MOVE TO A TOTALLY DIFFERENT PART OF THE SCREEN? WHY?

God forbid if you forget to change focus to Window B and you open the File menu for Window A without noticing!

So I ask you mac fanboys. Having a menu bar that is specific to the active application but located in a physically different area of the screen, why on Earth is that good? Please explain because I certainly don't get it.


Ugh, stupid global bar.

Edit: It occurred to me that one reason for doing this was because of the previous complaints about their idiotic moving of the close-maximize-minimize buttons to the left side of the window, with one criticism being "The close button is too close to the File menu." A global top-bar is not a valid solution to this criticism!


Posted on 2010-12-23 by Jach

Tags: fodder

Permalink: https://www.thejach.com/view/id/149

Trackback URL: https://www.thejach.com/view/2010/12/blog_fodder_why_ubuntu_why

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