Swiping from the edges is exactly what I was hoping Google would do with Android, instead of wasting screen space with buttons. I think all Android's buttons could be repurposed into "edge actions", although they'd have to make them intuitive enough for people to get it quickly.
Swiping from the left and right edges on phones is prone to get confused with the swiping inside apps, that's the reason that none of the big mobile OSes have it. I am curious to see whether that's taken care of here.
This is already a problem with Chrome for iOS. It makes building apps in the browser difficult when swiping on the left and right edges triggers a "tab" switch.
Chrome for Android does the same (you can change tabs by swiping left-right), and it's very unreliable - I manage to change tabs by accident by swiping, but can never do that on purpose...
Interestingly, I find the gestures from the side work much better on the Nexus 4 with the screen curve. Seems they designed the phone with chrome in mind.
Tough to make invisible things intuitive, but you can always force a quick intro tutorial like webOS and Windows 8. Trouble is, hand your device to someone else and they might have no idea how to operate it.
Jolla is really pushing edge gestures in their interface, and in the demo videos that have floated around in the last couple months it looks like a joy to operate.
In Phobuuntu's defense, you just need to know that the app quickmenu is on the left, status bar on the top, previous thing on the right, and application options on the bottom.
Edge actions and gestures are great as shortcuts for advanced users. I'm starting to think that "no chrome" UIs will never be suitable for ordinary users. Especially because they, practically speaking, will never be standard.
Android innovates on connections between apps more than the interface design itself. For the most part, the interface design is simply a modified desktop approach.
However, I would note that Google changed the old search button into a "swipe up from bottom" approach for Android 4.1. This brings up Google Now + voice search. So there is some "swipe from edge" functionality.
For Ubuntu Phone, the functions of the different edges will take getting used to. Of course, power users will eat it up.
"...there are no immediate plans for actual Ubuntu phones, and no carriers have been signed up yet -- although we're told that the OS will run on any new phone built for Android, should the manufacturer see merit in installing Ubuntu instead."
It will be interesting to see if/when a manufacturer picks this up, to hit the mainstream market.
I really wish Canonical would focus on making the Linux Desktop/Laptop experience better but perhaps this will play out like Apple: bootstrap the company's growth on the success of a mobile device (iPod in Apple's case). Plus, Canonical can offer something Google really can't: a common interface across all devices (Chromebook hasn't really worked out).
Amazon is the main channel for Chromebooks but not Macbooks. Amazon may not be a great sample of the laptop market percentage. I see way more Apple laptops than Chromebooks day to day. It'd be great if that changed in the future (and perhaps it will after this holiday shopping season via your link).
Although their bank balance begs to differ... Ultimately though I would agree with you and hope smartphones will just be thought of as small computers in the future, you buy the hardware and have choices about what OS you want to run. I would love to be able to install different distros like with PC's, Mint Mobile running Cinnamon Touch would be good.
It's a full Ubuntu Desktop. Dock your phone and run "sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping". Or, alternatively, just open the Software Centre and remove it from there.
This is a good thing, but having known Canonical and Ubuntu since the start (2004), I would really love to see them succeed in the desktop market first. This initiative will de-focus their efforts.
I admire them, and wish them good luck anyway.
Bullshit, people still need to make things. Make emails, edit videos, edit photos, write documents. These aren't business class activities, but touch screens are insufficient for that function.
I don't see people lugging around a laptop anymore, but I easily see people plugging their phone into a display, throwing a bluetooth or usb keyboard + mouse on, and expecting a productivity environment from that device. The hardware has the power to do that now.
I can do that with my Android tablet. If I were to do that with an Ubuntu phone, though, I'd have access to much more mature productivity software built for the desktop.
> If I were to do that with an Ubuntu phone, though, I'd have access to much more mature productivity software built for the desktop.
Sure you COULD, but serious productivity software is written to make maximal use of input devices. Keyboard shortcut usage is often not optional. That isn't going to translate to a touchscreen, or even a slide-out microkeyboards.
> At the point you're carrying around a keyboard anyway, why not just have a Macbook Air?
Because you _don't have to_ carry around a keyboard and a display if you don't plan on producing content and just want to make phone calls read ebooks.
Can I tear off the screen and keyboard off a Macbook Air and use it as a phone? No? Well then I want a Ubuntu Phone then.
Well at least in theory ...
Another way to look at it, I already have a TV, a laptop, a tablet, and a phone. As mobile hardware gets faster and better, I would eventually just love to have one device -- a phone. I could connect it to my large screen tv, a good keyboard, a smaller LCD display, USB storage and so on.
I thought it would be great to have one device as well, but then I realized that sometimes I want to use my phone while watching TV or using the laptop, so they can't really be one device, unless I wear a wireless headset, which I don't really want to carry around along with my phone (another thing to charge, another thing to lose).
A multi tasking OS with a powerful CPU and wireless video streaming should provide those at least in theory. There is actually Miracast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracast so in theory the bits and pieces are here already they just have to work as a package.
Canonical doesnt produce video, photo and document editing software. The market's refusal to port that software to Linux has essentially killed it on the desktop for a majority of users. If they dont want to port, there is absolutely nothing Canonical can do about it. A new player cannot simply enter a new market and without effort get a significant part of it.
The only thing they _can_ do is get foothold in a new market first (mobile), then leverage that to get more influence on the desktop. Like Microsoft is leveraging their desktop monopoly to get foothold in mobile.
Well Canonical doesn't produce those things by default they just bundle whatever the latest and greatest open source offering is. Which sucks compared to the professional choices out there on Mac and Windows _but_ is better than what is available on Android OS perhaps.
So in theory this a good move. In practice though, they have a huge mountain to climb. They have to market the hell out o f this and they have to provide a comparable experience to mature and battle tested mobile OSes.
I am all behind them and support them and this phone is probably something I would love as a developer (as I feel like my hands are tied when using Android) but I am afraid this will end up in a very small and irrelevant niche.
First and foremost is to ask so what major cell carrier is going to support this. If the answer is none then well we know the future of this.
> Canonical doesnt produce video, photo and document editing software.
I think, by that argument, Canonical isn't making any software, not even a GNU/Linux distribution. They might not be much involved in developing non-linear video editing software, but they are involved in the various free software projects for everything else on that list?
I actually think this could help their desktop OS become more popular, so I'm excited about it, especially if they don't intend to lock down their bootloaders or allow carriers or manufacturers to mess with it too much.
I just hope they don't start selling them in 2014 with obsolete technologies like the ARMv7 platform and OpenGL ES 2.0. They need to start with the 64 bit ARMv8 and OpenGL ES 3.0 GPU's. Better to start fresh, especially considering they're launching so late.
If you think this is going to de-focus Canonical's efforts you may be in a bit of denial on what their focus is.
Their focused effort is very clearly to be a player in a tablet/phone "post PC" space. Virtually everything they've done for the past 2 years points to this. If anything, this is proof of the focus of their efforts, you (like many of us) may just not like the path they've decided to go down.
The desktop market is more or less disappearing. On the business end of things, business has no issue paying the paltry sum of what windows + office costs.
I'm not sure what else they can do in the desktop space. IMHO, Unity sucks pretty hard on the desktop and both MS and Ubuntu have taken major missteps.
I also imagine Win8 SP1 will bring back some kind of classic mode. Not sure if Unity will ever be desktop-ified other than running a variant of ubuntu like Kubuntu.
I used to agree with this but it has gotten incrementally a lot better in the last couple of releases. I've watched non-geeks figure out how to use it without trouble, and after all the biggest potential market for a Linux desktop OS is the population of non-geeks.
I keep hearing people say this, I keep trying it again and I keep being disappointed and going back to Xfce.
I mean, every time you press Alt, the menu bar at the top of the screen flashes. That's a horrible, distracting misfeature encountered in the first 30 seconds of using the thing.
Not likely to try desktop Unity a fourth time, no matter how many people say “it's getting better”.
> the biggest potential market for a Linux desktop OS is the population of non-geeks
Are you sure? Not as long as Linux is something you have to install yourself. Do you use Unity? OS X manages to be approachable to everyone without alienating most geeks/developers.
I say this all the time but I'll say it again: Xubuntu, the flavor with Xfce as its desktop environment, has IMHO been an excellent choice for several years now. There's no tablet version but it works well, does what you expect and isn't being messed with constantly like other Linux desktops.
After much messing around with xfce, gnome-session-fallback and cinnamon, I finally stopped worrying and learned to love the Unity just before upgrading to version 12.10.
> I mean, every time you press Alt, the menu bar at the top of the screen flashes. That's a horrible, distracting misfeature encountered in the first 30 seconds of using the thing.
> I mean, every time you press Alt, the menu bar at the top of the screen flashes. That's a horrible, distracting misfeature encountered in the first 30 seconds of using the thing.
How else are you going to access the menu with the keyboard?
I think you mean "declining" rather than disappearing.
The last I heard (october news) pc sales were expected to decline by 1% in 2012. If that means "disappearing", that would mean the auto industry has disappeared years ago.
I think Ubuntu is quite successful in the desktop market.
Whenever I see GNU/Linux installation on some desktop or notebook, it's almost always Ubuntu. If people want to switch to some GNU/Linux distribution from Windows or OS X, it's almost always Ubuntu.
So in this respect, I would say they are quite successful.
I've come to conclude (as a home-and-office Linux user for nigh on 15 years now) that the standard Unix gui environment of X + widget toolkits + desktop environment is just too multilayered and complex to work for non-boffins. Too many moving parts that can go subtly wrong.
You can succeed as an end-user Unix, but you have to burn down the gui architecture and start over.
Apple ditched X. Android ditched X. But no "desktop Linux" offering has yet completely ditched the legacy junk. You'd need that (and good OEM relationships) to succeed.
What' s the architecture of this Ubuntu phone gui? Is it gtk and X.org? or something new?
I think they already realized that the desktop market is shrinking. Come to think of it, in my extended family I don't even know anyone who bought a desktop computer in the last 4 years. A few people got a laptop, lots of smart phones and tons of tablets.
So if they are going to wait to succeed on the desktop it might be too late. As fewer and fewer people will care about the desktop by that point.
On the contrary, due it being the same base, it will actually make the apps faster and more memory performant on the desktop, because it has to run in a constrained environment on mobile. I think it'll make for a more performant desktop OS.
2014 is a long way away and a whole year is an eternity in mobile space.
It kind of looks like Unity in portrait mode but without the dock.
What does it bring new to developers that isn't there in Android? Firefox OS's USP is web apps with native bindings(same as WebOS').
It says it uses the Android kernel and drivers to be compatible with the hardware, so will OEM(s) shipping devices with this OSes fall foul of Google's anti-fork rules[1] for Android? Or does that apply only to the Android SDK/Dalvik VM?
The golden handcuffs are your ability to ship Android's userland (including access to use of trademarks and Play Store). If Google shuts you out, you're out. Ship all the linux kernels you want.
Technically, you can probably ship something based on pure AOSP, but your competitors will have had pre-AOSP access to the code for multiple months and there are no guarantees that AOSP even works without Google's magic proprietary mojo. CyanogenMod had to develop the missing pieces when Google sent their C&D over the proprietary bits. I would suspect defensive things designed to make it more difficult for Amazon to leech AOSP are either present or coming soon particularly with the rumors that Amazon is working toward introducing a phone.
> there are no guarantees that AOSP even works without Google's magic proprietary mojo
What do you mean by this? If you mean in the market, it can work. Amazon's devices are proof. If a manufacturer is shipping just AOSP, it needs to have a working complement to Google's suite of apps or it needs to have a different value proposition altogether.
> CyanogenMod had to develop the missing pieces when Google sent their C&D over the proprietary bits
What "missing bits"? They were shipping Google's suite of proprietary apps on top of their AOSP-based ROM and they stopped after the C&D.
Once Google's proprietary stuff was deleted, it was not possible to provision a phone (until the FOSS alternates for things like Provision.apk were developed). I can't remember if you got bootloops or what. There were other problems, too. I think AOSP has been friendly toward patches for that sort of thing... ensuring AOSP without gapps works just wasn't one of Google's requirements (at least early on--it may be now for all I know). Not that you can really fault them for having different priorities.
What it boils down to is that Google has a final approval over any Google-logo Android device. For phone OEMs, this looks like absolute and arbitrary control by Google, but, in reality, it's a three-way negotiation between the OEM, Google, and, in the US, the carrier controlling the channel for the product, with any one of them able to sink a product before it reaches the market.
Google has never seen fit to make licensing terms for Google's ecosystem apps (Maps, Play, etc.) transparent. That's a pretty sharp contrast with Android as an open source project, and even with the way Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone) was licensed.
So Android is open, on the one (AOSP) hand, and un-transparently proprietary on the other hand. That leaves an obvious market opening for a truly open OS. But, so far, Tizen, Open WebOS, or any other possible contenders have been insufficient and/or under-developed. Maybe Canonical will get it right.
> It says it uses the Android kernel and drivers to be compatible with the hardware
Where did you see that? Are you sure you're not confusing it with the "Ubuntu for Android" project? That is a different project from this.
I don't think an Ubuntu phone will have anything to do with Android. It's its own OS, and you won't see it on all phones or anything like that - just on the "Ubuntu phones" that will be shipping starting with 2014. They might port it to some existing hardware like Galaxy Nexus for demo purposes, though, the way Mozilla did with Firefox OS on Galaxy S2.
"As already teased and promised, today Canonical is taking the wraps off the mobile version of Ubuntu, which is built around the existing Android kernel and drivers, but doesn't use a Java Virtual Machine and promises to use "the full power of the phone.""
> Ubuntu has already been adapted to run on chipsets using the ARM and Intel x86 architectures relevant for mobile devices, with the core system based around a typical Android Board Support Package (BSP). So chipset vendors and hardware manufacturers do not need to invest in or maintain new hardware support packages for Ubuntu on smartphones. In short, if you already make handsets that run Android, the work needed to adopt Ubuntu will be trivial.
But that doesn't say anything about being related in any way with Android code, does it?
Also I think since kernel 3.3 Android uses the exact same kernel as other Linux distros. The Android kernel got merged with the normal Linux kernel. So I don't see why it would be a problem for them to use the same kernel.
Not everything from Android is in the mainline kernels. There are still a few bits that are Android specific that would need to be reworked to even be accepted into staging.
There has been a lot of great ARM work lately in mainline too but there are still quite a few drivers missing that you can't even get docs for (even with signing NDAs) so the drivers for mainline get written based on the BSP-ish kernel drivers which aren't always written the best.
He never said it did. He said that they can use Android kernel and drivers. That doesn't mean it's using Android's java environment, just the kernel and drivers beneath it.
I think they are trying to tell device & part manufacturers that since both Ubuntu and Android are Linux kernels, they won't need to rewrite their drivers. Perhaps they've borrowed code from the Android kernel?
Wow, I'm impressed even though it is just a demo video. One thing that doesn't feel intuitive to me is the left/right edge choices. It's the same problem with Windows 8, I feel like if I pull an app in from one side, I should be able to switch to the previous app by pulling in from the other side.
>What does it bring new to developers that isn't there in Android? Firefox OS's USP is web apps with native bindings
Connect a display and you have full ubuntu. With today's smartphones already computationally competitive with your standard netbook, that alone is a massive value proposition to me. Add something like motorola's lapdock and there is 95% of all my computing needs met, all with a single, central data storage.
Hopefully porting from linux will be fairly straightforward too.. just a new UI support?, giving apps that work from desktop to mobile. Not to mention that is has most of the FFOS advantage too.
> Hopefully porting from linux will be fairly straightforward too.. just a new UI support?, giving apps that work from desktop to mobile. Not to mention that is has most of the FFOS advantage too.
I wouldn't trivialise the effort required to create a touch-friendly UI, especially from an existing desktop application (with the expectations that go with it).
Well, you're assuming they would need a new UI. You know what would be really nice to have on a phone if it didn't take any real effort to get it there? bash, ssh, nfs/sshfs/samba, etc.
I know the typical user isn't going to care, but I could see how it would be a big win for developers, and as we all know, "developers developers developers."
I don't know. But Maemo didn't also happen to be the most popular desktop Linux distribution. And it was effectively abandoned at birth by its creators, which I have a suspicion Canonical is not about to do.
I got some basic n900 apps up and running pretty easily with vala and the maemo touch widgets. porting an existing ui might be hard, but building one around a set of touch widgets is relatively straightforward.
And what happens when a desktop monitor is connected? Will it give me the same small-screen touch-optimized app or are the apps supposed switch to desktop UI mode? The former would be disastrous, and the latter would be optimal but extremely unlikely (to put it lightly).
It seems half-baked...
There is absolutely nothing stopping us developers from sensing when it occurs and switching accordingly. This is really the point: we can choose to scale from Desktop to Mobile UI's, sanely, without having the market separation enforced upon us by those who would control the industry.
Do you know how easy it is to port touch-friendly UI frameworks/SDK's such as MOAI (http://getmoai.com/) to Ubuntu? Damn easy.
In fact, its already done: and right now, MOAI - and similar tools, just like it (Love2D, Cocos2D, &etc.) - are already out there, running on the existing OS's, and providing multi-touch interfaces that definitely compete with existing Frameworks/SDK's. There is little that Cocoa does, for the 2D gamer/mobile developer, that MOAI cannot do, also. (Granted: native interfaces are a weakness, but then again: non-native, truly cross-platform UI's are a STRENGTH in the face of the existing market)
By making this move, Canonical has just invalidated all the proprietary bullshit the average Objective-C developer has to contend with, in order to develop an app for the mobile platform. Same with Android - both Objective-C and Android investments have just been bumped down a few tens of points, in my opinion. Why bother learning proprietary locked-in crap, when you can pick a framework that will run easily on all of the platforms, including the up and coming new Ubuntu-Mobile?
Where once we have over-specialization and a slavish devotion to technocratic dogma from an oppressive regime (Apple, and in lesser yet still significant ways, Android too), we now have a real ability to choose our tools and standardize on the ones with which we most feel comfortable.
Make no mistake, this is a genius move. Not only do we have Mobile becoming Desktop becoming the Cloud, finally, but we have it with Open Tools, that no other company has the balls to produce.
> Do you know how easy it is to port touch-friendly UI frameworks/SDK's such as MOAI (http://getmoai.com/) to Ubuntu? Damn easy.
Starting from an existing touch framework/application is not the problem.
"Porting" a desktop application to a touch application is not "just" (to quote polshaw) adding a new UI. There's a world of difference between a desktop GUI--esp. in the Linux world, where many apps are remarkably different due to the ecosystem--and a touch GUI. Touch target sizing, what information to get rid of (if any?), what to add, speed (arguably more important on a mobile device), hardware acceleration (read: being gentle on battery life & improving touch responsiveness)... it goes on.
The OS might have Ubuntu/Linux roots, but it doesn't automatically mean it gets a free ride to a great touch-friendly mobile app library.
You also have to be aware of context, otherwise you will have apps downloading crap loads of data over your limited SIM contract, or eating up your battery for something that only makes a difference on desktop...
I wonder if they use libhybris or something similar to pull that trick and to use bionic drivers. I hope they'll push for regular glibc drivers as well though.
Oh great, another Ubuntu for %s with no shipping devices.
I really wish Canonical would partner with some OEM to actually produce some of these devices instead of just announcing they have software while expecting hardware OEMs to come running. I'd even be happy if they produced a firmware for use on the GN or N4.
From the interview on Engadget, it seems they also want to rely on the community to basically make Ubuntu ROM's for Android devices, although their priority is still to partner with OEM's to make new Ubuntu phones.
They'd be relying heavily on other phone designers including display adapters in their phones, which virtually nobody has done so far. Motorola have one model, but I can't remember seeing any others.
Firefox is already doing this on Android with the marketplace though. They are providing abstraction layers on the marketplace to let web apps take first class citizenry rolls on the current market leader. So it isn't a very persuasive argument for adoption.
From what it looks like, I'd need to redesign my apps from ground up using QML. They could have leveraged Android apps ecossystem, like Amazon, OUYA and even BB10 are doing. But chose not to. Out of nothing other than greed. And for that one reason, I predict dead on arrival.
Edit: Just had an Ubuntu community manager answer my question on their official g+ hangout. And confirmed that indeed. You'd have to redesign apps for it from scratch in QML. Nor are they planing to make Android apps compatible, nor easy to port in any way. Oh well, I'm certainly not gonna waste my time developing for yet another platform. Goodbye.
They had a working prototype that would run Android and Ubuntu side by side. Would work as a standard Android phone. But when you dock it to the desktop, it's a 100% capable Ubuntu computer, sharing resources with Android. That was perfect. It's the best of both worlds, I'm sure it would be a huge hit. Leverage both the Android mobile ecosystem + Linux desktop at once? That was genius. But instead they chose the greedy path and try to control all of it themselves.
edit: I just learned that Ubuntu for Android was not abandoned. It's still a separate project. They wanna release Ubuntu for Android first in mid 2013. And hopefully that will be a gateway to get Android users interested in the Ubuntu Phone which will launch in 2014.
No it isn't an app. It is actually the full Ubuntu OS running on your android device. The point wasn't for it to be a touch screen, the point was that you could dock your device and suddenly be using a full desktop OS with all your desktop grade applications.
Motorola were the only OEM to have interest in ubuntu for android.. they took it, and completely ruined it.[1] There was no greed on canonical's part. I'm not sure whether i'd prefer 'android+ubuntu', or this 'ubuntu for all the screens' (existing ecosystem with mature OS vs a real free, unified desktop+mobile OS), but they aren't dropping either, apparently. I do wish they would allow the developer community access to their builds, though. I want it now!
1. see webtop; also look on XDA to see how to partially restore it to canonical's idea.
Another mobile framework, but not a new thing by any means. There are already plenty of Qt apps and libs (desktop + Symbian apps written with Qt4.8 + QML) out there.
But yes, porting from Android/Windows/iOS might be painfull.
I really want to give a "fuck yeah" for using qt as the app backend. I think qt5 is amazing and hope it can really take off. Especially with Necessitas you can port Ubuntu native apps to Android easily, and then porting to the desktop is trivial. I don't think they talked enough about how you can easily write a qt5 app that can run on everything but ios (and even that is seeing some traction).
I wonder how this is going to conflate with their ongoing focus on the desktop towards python + gtk apps. Also, Plasma Active is already targeting mobile and I don't like how once again the GNU stack is fragmenting in approaching mobile into 3 camps (plasma active, gnome, ubuntu).
"I wonder how this is going to conflate with their ongoing focus on the desktop towards python + gtk apps."
Are they?.
IMHO they are making Unity and everything else use Qt. Python could use Qt too.
I had a lot of apps that used gtk, it was ok in the past when the license of Qt was not LGPL, but now I'm porting everything to native and Qt.(luckily I abstracted the UI).
Gtk just has not serious support for OpenGL, mac or Windows.
Can. Pyside is very mature for GUI building now. My concern is that the Ubuntu phone OS might not be beefy enough to run a bunch of python interpreters for apps, or that it might not come with one stock.
I always wished for myself and for the larger web community a 'Rock solid web based Open' Mobile Platform, and the change is happening very fast.
I fell in love with Ubuntu, with the 12.04 Release. Remarkable, well thought user experience.
6 months back, I switched completely to Ubuntu 12.04 and its my primary machine now. I'm blown away with their agile methodologies, love every small part of the web-integration and the Ubuntu software market.
Worth mentioning, Ubuntu Desktop is also strongly emerging as perfect web platform with tight integration with web-services. Many Developers are considering this as a strong open platform(as its web), and have started writing apps for ubuntu software market. So these apps should run seamlessly on Smartphones too.
The concept of HUD to search inside an webapps and navigate complex menu's is revolutionary! Worth mentioning, webapps are now exactly like native desktop apps; I recently used the Gmail webapp, it opens as separate app and we can search inside gmail. (They have an API to enable such HUD controls for any webapp).
All such advancements are only possible today, as we have faster Javascript engines, can leverage Cloud services, access to cheaper hardware and much faster Internet Penetration and adoption than ever before. The web can function as a strong platform by itself and not a hybrid model.
This is exciting. They are truly talking about a single device that does it all for you -- your phone is your computer.
The phone UI looks a bit different, he says "clean and simple," but just from the video it seems like a bit much to do things. That could just be an initial reaction based on years of other phone OS usage.
Why hasnt anyone run with WebOS' UI approach? The whole cards thing seems like the best approach i've seen thus far
Now I know what I will be getting when my N900 finally laid to rest.
It's not just Ubuntu, but the whole variety of Linux flavours for phone that will surely arise once hardware is here.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadI found it incredibly confusing in the context of using a mouse, but never tried it with touch.
Jolla is really pushing edge gestures in their interface, and in the demo videos that have floated around in the last couple months it looks like a joy to operate.
However, I would note that Google changed the old search button into a "swipe up from bottom" approach for Android 4.1. This brings up Google Now + voice search. So there is some "swipe from edge" functionality.
For Ubuntu Phone, the functions of the different edges will take getting used to. Of course, power users will eat it up.
It will be interesting to see if/when a manufacturer picks this up, to hit the mainstream market.
Where it would get interesting is if they introduced this as a UML guest Android app.
What?
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/chromebook-christmas-be...
Definitely far from not working out! I think it's pretty darn proven as a consumer product.
Anyone who was paying attention when they starting shoving Unity down user's throats knew where this was headed years ago.
I don't see people lugging around a laptop anymore, but I easily see people plugging their phone into a display, throwing a bluetooth or usb keyboard + mouse on, and expecting a productivity environment from that device. The hardware has the power to do that now.
I can do that with my Android tablet. If I were to do that with an Ubuntu phone, though, I'd have access to much more mature productivity software built for the desktop.
Sure you COULD, but serious productivity software is written to make maximal use of input devices. Keyboard shortcut usage is often not optional. That isn't going to translate to a touchscreen, or even a slide-out microkeyboards.
At the point you're carrying around a keyboard anyway, why not just have a Macbook Air?
Because you _don't have to_ carry around a keyboard and a display if you don't plan on producing content and just want to make phone calls read ebooks.
Can I tear off the screen and keyboard off a Macbook Air and use it as a phone? No? Well then I want a Ubuntu Phone then.
Well at least in theory ...
Another way to look at it, I already have a TV, a laptop, a tablet, and a phone. As mobile hardware gets faster and better, I would eventually just love to have one device -- a phone. I could connect it to my large screen tv, a good keyboard, a smaller LCD display, USB storage and so on.
Canonical doesnt produce video, photo and document editing software. The market's refusal to port that software to Linux has essentially killed it on the desktop for a majority of users. If they dont want to port, there is absolutely nothing Canonical can do about it. A new player cannot simply enter a new market and without effort get a significant part of it.
The only thing they _can_ do is get foothold in a new market first (mobile), then leverage that to get more influence on the desktop. Like Microsoft is leveraging their desktop monopoly to get foothold in mobile.
So in theory this a good move. In practice though, they have a huge mountain to climb. They have to market the hell out o f this and they have to provide a comparable experience to mature and battle tested mobile OSes.
I am all behind them and support them and this phone is probably something I would love as a developer (as I feel like my hands are tied when using Android) but I am afraid this will end up in a very small and irrelevant niche.
First and foremost is to ask so what major cell carrier is going to support this. If the answer is none then well we know the future of this.
I think, by that argument, Canonical isn't making any software, not even a GNU/Linux distribution. They might not be much involved in developing non-linear video editing software, but they are involved in the various free software projects for everything else on that list?
I just hope they don't start selling them in 2014 with obsolete technologies like the ARMv7 platform and OpenGL ES 2.0. They need to start with the 64 bit ARMv8 and OpenGL ES 3.0 GPU's. Better to start fresh, especially considering they're launching so late.
Their focused effort is very clearly to be a player in a tablet/phone "post PC" space. Virtually everything they've done for the past 2 years points to this. If anything, this is proof of the focus of their efforts, you (like many of us) may just not like the path they've decided to go down.
I'm not sure what else they can do in the desktop space. IMHO, Unity sucks pretty hard on the desktop and both MS and Ubuntu have taken major missteps.
I also imagine Win8 SP1 will bring back some kind of classic mode. Not sure if Unity will ever be desktop-ified other than running a variant of ubuntu like Kubuntu.
I used to agree with this but it has gotten incrementally a lot better in the last couple of releases. I've watched non-geeks figure out how to use it without trouble, and after all the biggest potential market for a Linux desktop OS is the population of non-geeks.
I keep hearing people say this, I keep trying it again and I keep being disappointed and going back to Xfce.
I mean, every time you press Alt, the menu bar at the top of the screen flashes. That's a horrible, distracting misfeature encountered in the first 30 seconds of using the thing.
Not likely to try desktop Unity a fourth time, no matter how many people say “it's getting better”.
> the biggest potential market for a Linux desktop OS is the population of non-geeks
Are you sure? Not as long as Linux is something you have to install yourself. Do you use Unity? OS X manages to be approachable to everyone without alienating most geeks/developers.
I'm using OS X, and I love it. But I think Apple is going to fuck it up eventually, somehow. And hopefully, by then, Ubuntu will be a good choice.
After much messing around with xfce, gnome-session-fallback and cinnamon, I finally stopped worrying and learned to love the Unity just before upgrading to version 12.10.
It's configurable.
How else are you going to access the menu with the keyboard?
I think you mean "declining" rather than disappearing.
The last I heard (october news) pc sales were expected to decline by 1% in 2012. If that means "disappearing", that would mean the auto industry has disappeared years ago.
Whenever I see GNU/Linux installation on some desktop or notebook, it's almost always Ubuntu. If people want to switch to some GNU/Linux distribution from Windows or OS X, it's almost always Ubuntu.
So in this respect, I would say they are quite successful.
You can succeed as an end-user Unix, but you have to burn down the gui architecture and start over.
Apple ditched X. Android ditched X. But no "desktop Linux" offering has yet completely ditched the legacy junk. You'd need that (and good OEM relationships) to succeed.
What' s the architecture of this Ubuntu phone gui? Is it gtk and X.org? or something new?
Ubuntu Phone uses Qt/QML and HTML5: http://developer.ubuntu.com/get-started/gomobile/
So if they are going to wait to succeed on the desktop it might be too late. As fewer and fewer people will care about the desktop by that point.
I'm pretty sure that when grandparent wrote, "desktop," they meant to include laptops.
worth watching, Trust me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWHJDLsqTU
Direct link to 6:35 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpWHJDLsqTU&feature=play...
First thoughts:
2014 is a long way away and a whole year is an eternity in mobile space.
It kind of looks like Unity in portrait mode but without the dock.
What does it bring new to developers that isn't there in Android? Firefox OS's USP is web apps with native bindings(same as WebOS').
It says it uses the Android kernel and drivers to be compatible with the hardware, so will OEM(s) shipping devices with this OSes fall foul of Google's anti-fork rules[1] for Android? Or does that apply only to the Android SDK/Dalvik VM?
[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57512418-94/alibaba-google-...
Amazon has forked Android, but by doing so they aren't allowed to use any of Google's apps in their devices.
Technically, you can probably ship something based on pure AOSP, but your competitors will have had pre-AOSP access to the code for multiple months and there are no guarantees that AOSP even works without Google's magic proprietary mojo. CyanogenMod had to develop the missing pieces when Google sent their C&D over the proprietary bits. I would suspect defensive things designed to make it more difficult for Amazon to leech AOSP are either present or coming soon particularly with the rumors that Amazon is working toward introducing a phone.
What do you mean by this? If you mean in the market, it can work. Amazon's devices are proof. If a manufacturer is shipping just AOSP, it needs to have a working complement to Google's suite of apps or it needs to have a different value proposition altogether.
> CyanogenMod had to develop the missing pieces when Google sent their C&D over the proprietary bits
What "missing bits"? They were shipping Google's suite of proprietary apps on top of their AOSP-based ROM and they stopped after the C&D.
What it boils down to is that Google has a final approval over any Google-logo Android device. For phone OEMs, this looks like absolute and arbitrary control by Google, but, in reality, it's a three-way negotiation between the OEM, Google, and, in the US, the carrier controlling the channel for the product, with any one of them able to sink a product before it reaches the market.
Google has never seen fit to make licensing terms for Google's ecosystem apps (Maps, Play, etc.) transparent. That's a pretty sharp contrast with Android as an open source project, and even with the way Windows Mobile (not Windows Phone) was licensed.
So Android is open, on the one (AOSP) hand, and un-transparently proprietary on the other hand. That leaves an obvious market opening for a truly open OS. But, so far, Tizen, Open WebOS, or any other possible contenders have been insufficient and/or under-developed. Maybe Canonical will get it right.
Where did you see that? Are you sure you're not confusing it with the "Ubuntu for Android" project? That is a different project from this.
I don't think an Ubuntu phone will have anything to do with Android. It's its own OS, and you won't see it on all phones or anything like that - just on the "Ubuntu phones" that will be shipping starting with 2014. They might port it to some existing hardware like Galaxy Nexus for demo purposes, though, the way Mozilla did with Firefox OS on Galaxy S2.
"As already teased and promised, today Canonical is taking the wraps off the mobile version of Ubuntu, which is built around the existing Android kernel and drivers, but doesn't use a Java Virtual Machine and promises to use "the full power of the phone.""
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/2/3827922/ubuntu-phone-os-ann...
I got confused with all the simultaneous news articles so sorry about the "it says" part.
It was mentioned in the keynote video, towards the very end ~21:00.
> Ubuntu has already been adapted to run on chipsets using the ARM and Intel x86 architectures relevant for mobile devices, with the core system based around a typical Android Board Support Package (BSP). So chipset vendors and hardware manufacturers do not need to invest in or maintain new hardware support packages for Ubuntu on smartphones. In short, if you already make handsets that run Android, the work needed to adopt Ubuntu will be trivial.
Also I think since kernel 3.3 Android uses the exact same kernel as other Linux distros. The Android kernel got merged with the normal Linux kernel. So I don't see why it would be a problem for them to use the same kernel.
There has been a lot of great ARM work lately in mainline too but there are still quite a few drivers missing that you can't even get docs for (even with signing NDAs) so the drivers for mainline get written based on the BSP-ish kernel drivers which aren't always written the best.
Connect a display and you have full ubuntu. With today's smartphones already computationally competitive with your standard netbook, that alone is a massive value proposition to me. Add something like motorola's lapdock and there is 95% of all my computing needs met, all with a single, central data storage.
Hopefully porting from linux will be fairly straightforward too.. just a new UI support?, giving apps that work from desktop to mobile. Not to mention that is has most of the FFOS advantage too.
I didn't see this mentioned in the keynote. I was specifically looking for it and there were zero mentions?
It doesn't sound all that wonderful.
Desktop/mobile crossover might be better served with cloud-sync.
Except if I'm in a developing nation where I'm not guaranteed connectivity. (Don't scoff yet, because I'd say the US is in this category.)
Maybe this is going to be the mobile toolkit you’re talking about?..
I wouldn't trivialise the effort required to create a touch-friendly UI, especially from an existing desktop application (with the expectations that go with it).
I know the typical user isn't going to care, but I could see how it would be a big win for developers, and as we all know, "developers developers developers."
In fact, its already done: and right now, MOAI - and similar tools, just like it (Love2D, Cocos2D, &etc.) - are already out there, running on the existing OS's, and providing multi-touch interfaces that definitely compete with existing Frameworks/SDK's. There is little that Cocoa does, for the 2D gamer/mobile developer, that MOAI cannot do, also. (Granted: native interfaces are a weakness, but then again: non-native, truly cross-platform UI's are a STRENGTH in the face of the existing market)
By making this move, Canonical has just invalidated all the proprietary bullshit the average Objective-C developer has to contend with, in order to develop an app for the mobile platform. Same with Android - both Objective-C and Android investments have just been bumped down a few tens of points, in my opinion. Why bother learning proprietary locked-in crap, when you can pick a framework that will run easily on all of the platforms, including the up and coming new Ubuntu-Mobile?
Where once we have over-specialization and a slavish devotion to technocratic dogma from an oppressive regime (Apple, and in lesser yet still significant ways, Android too), we now have a real ability to choose our tools and standardize on the ones with which we most feel comfortable.
Make no mistake, this is a genius move. Not only do we have Mobile becoming Desktop becoming the Cloud, finally, but we have it with Open Tools, that no other company has the balls to produce.
Starting from an existing touch framework/application is not the problem.
"Porting" a desktop application to a touch application is not "just" (to quote polshaw) adding a new UI. There's a world of difference between a desktop GUI--esp. in the Linux world, where many apps are remarkably different due to the ecosystem--and a touch GUI. Touch target sizing, what information to get rid of (if any?), what to add, speed (arguably more important on a mobile device), hardware acceleration (read: being gentle on battery life & improving touch responsiveness)... it goes on.
The OS might have Ubuntu/Linux roots, but it doesn't automatically mean it gets a free ride to a great touch-friendly mobile app library.
I really wish Canonical would partner with some OEM to actually produce some of these devices instead of just announcing they have software while expecting hardware OEMs to come running. I'd even be happy if they produced a firmware for use on the GN or N4.
From what it looks like, I'd need to redesign my apps from ground up using QML. They could have leveraged Android apps ecossystem, like Amazon, OUYA and even BB10 are doing. But chose not to. Out of nothing other than greed. And for that one reason, I predict dead on arrival.
Edit: Just had an Ubuntu community manager answer my question on their official g+ hangout. And confirmed that indeed. You'd have to redesign apps for it from scratch in QML. Nor are they planing to make Android apps compatible, nor easy to port in any way. Oh well, I'm certainly not gonna waste my time developing for yet another platform. Goodbye.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv1Z7bf4jXY
edit: I just learned that Ubuntu for Android was not abandoned. It's still a separate project. They wanna release Ubuntu for Android first in mid 2013. And hopefully that will be a gateway to get Android users interested in the Ubuntu Phone which will launch in 2014.
http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android
1. see webtop; also look on XDA to see how to partially restore it to canonical's idea.
But yes, porting from Android/Windows/iOS might be painfull.
I wonder how this is going to conflate with their ongoing focus on the desktop towards python + gtk apps. Also, Plasma Active is already targeting mobile and I don't like how once again the GNU stack is fragmenting in approaching mobile into 3 camps (plasma active, gnome, ubuntu).
Are they?.
IMHO they are making Unity and everything else use Qt. Python could use Qt too.
I had a lot of apps that used gtk, it was ok in the past when the license of Qt was not LGPL, but now I'm porting everything to native and Qt.(luckily I abstracted the UI).
Gtk just has not serious support for OpenGL, mac or Windows.
Can. Pyside is very mature for GUI building now. My concern is that the Ubuntu phone OS might not be beefy enough to run a bunch of python interpreters for apps, or that it might not come with one stock.
I fell in love with Ubuntu, with the 12.04 Release. Remarkable, well thought user experience. 6 months back, I switched completely to Ubuntu 12.04 and its my primary machine now. I'm blown away with their agile methodologies, love every small part of the web-integration and the Ubuntu software market.
Worth mentioning, Ubuntu Desktop is also strongly emerging as perfect web platform with tight integration with web-services. Many Developers are considering this as a strong open platform(as its web), and have started writing apps for ubuntu software market. So these apps should run seamlessly on Smartphones too.
The concept of HUD to search inside an webapps and navigate complex menu's is revolutionary! Worth mentioning, webapps are now exactly like native desktop apps; I recently used the Gmail webapp, it opens as separate app and we can search inside gmail. (They have an API to enable such HUD controls for any webapp).
All such advancements are only possible today, as we have faster Javascript engines, can leverage Cloud services, access to cheaper hardware and much faster Internet Penetration and adoption than ever before. The web can function as a strong platform by itself and not a hybrid model.
The phone UI looks a bit different, he says "clean and simple," but just from the video it seems like a bit much to do things. That could just be an initial reaction based on years of other phone OS usage.
Why hasnt anyone run with WebOS' UI approach? The whole cards thing seems like the best approach i've seen thus far