Tumblr, on the other hand, is a great example of the ideals I’ve written about on this blog put into practice. It’s simple and effective. So if you’re following this blog, be sure to tune into Seanification at http://seanr.tumblr.com

After my post last week on the rumours of Apple buying Sony, I thought I’d finally write a post I’ve been thinking about for a while: a comparison between Sony and Google.

This may begin to sound like I hate Sony. Not at all. When it comes to certain products, they’re always the first brand I consider. I’ll probably be buying a new TV some time in the next year, and I’ve already decided I want a Sony. Every camera I’ve owned, both still and video, have been made by Sony too. Sony certainly make some excellent products, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them when it comes to certain products.

But as I said in my previous post, while Sony certainly makes some quality, they also make a lot of crap. In a lot of ways, I see their approach to product focus and product design as being similar to Google’s. Perhaps it’s fitting then that the two companies have worked together to produce the Google TV, a product which really accentuates the companies’ attitudes.

Both companies have their great products. For Sony, it’s mostly TVs and the Playstation; for Google, it’s mostly Search and GMail. Yet both companies also make a bewildering number of other products, some of which are good (but not great), and others that make you wonder why they even bother.

Evidently, both Sony and Google are putting all their best talent into their best products, and keeps them working on those projects alone. While this certainly keeps their best products great, it causes their not so great products to fall behind. Instead, if their best talent were overseeing the product design for their entire range, they would have consistently excellent products. Yet with their massive product ranges, this is certainly an impossibility.

So often with both Sony and Google products have I looked for consistent design or usability between two or more different products and not found it. Little design features I thought were great in my video camera were absent from my still camera for no good reason. Software metaphors between GMail and Google Docs are extremely inconsistent despite looking very similar (in fact, I think these inconsistencies are so bad I may go into them in a later post).

In a way, I guess it makes sense for the two companies to have come together on the Google TV. But have they put their best people on the project? Judging by the questionable interaction choices in the software and the hilariously over-complicated remote control, I’m guessing not.

It’s possible Apple could buy a small part of Sony, such as their entertainment businesses, but for them to take on the entirety of Sony’s gargantuan product line would be a huge mistake, and something that would be entirely out of keeping with Apple’s culture.

Apple and Sony are very different companies, with very different product philosophies. Apple has a relatively small and controlled range of products. They focus on consistent product updates, ensuring quality and cohesive, thoughtful design in everything they do. Sony, on the other hand, makes such a bewildering array of products that they can only really afford to ensure quality in a few of their offerings. There is little consistent design aspects across their various ranges, due no doubt to the disparate teams required to produce such a plethora of consumer devices.

If Apple were to buy Sony, they would go from having a manageable, tight set of products, each one the aspiration of their competitors, to an unwieldy and confusing mass of products, some of which are certainly excellent, but others that make you question why they even exist.

Don’t get me wrong, when Sony does something well they do it very well. Their TVs are excellent, and the PlayStation 3 is extremely successful. They also have a number of products, such as their stereo systems, cameras, camcorders, laptop computers, home theatre systems, headphones, and ebook readers, which while good, aren’t necessarily anything their competitors envy. Then there’s the array of stuff that could be made by any company out there to similar quality: alarm clocks, MP3 players, phones, digital photo frames. Even within each type of product, there is a massive amount of offerings: I count no less than 14 different series of LCD TVs on their Australian website, each series containing one or more distinct products.

The lack of cohesive design due to such a massive organisation is evident. From my own experiences, I’ve lamented how features present in one series of camera are absent for no good reason on another series of camera. And the last two alarm clocks I’ve owned, both made by Sony, looked and operated in such different ways you’d be astonished to learn they were from the same company.

Maybe I’m being unfair as I certainly haven’t tried everything Sony has to offer… but that’s precisely my point. One of the things that makes Apple accessible to consumers is that with such a streamlined range of products, it’s easy to decide what you want. If Apple were to take on support of all of Sony’s products, they would lose that advantage.

So I just don’t see it happening.

Also, I recently re-installed Fedora, and forgot how I’d previously set up my keyboard, so after a few hours research I really want to make a note of how I did it for the next time I have to go through the ordeal

Basic usage

The Apple keyboards are generally pretty well-supported in Fedora and Linux generally. “Out of the box”, the brightness keys, the audio playback keys, the volume keys, the eject key, and the function key all work as expected.

Command key

By default, the Command key on the Apple keyboard is mapped to the Linux Super key. This is the same key that the Windows key is mapped to on Windows keyboards. If you’re used to Mac OSX, you may not have much use for the Super key, and instead you’ll find yourself pressing Command for keyboard shortcuts that use Control in Linux, such as Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, and Ctrl+Z.

So, I simply mapped the Command key to be the same as the Control key. This way whenever I press Cmd+V, I actually get Ctrl+V. In Gnome, this is fairly easy to re-map. Go to System > Preferences > Keyboard, select the Layouts tab, and click the Options button. Expand the Alt/Win key behavior section, then check the box for Control is mapped to Win keys (and the usual Ctrl keys).

Now you can use the shortcuts you’re familiar with from the Mac OS without reassigning them all. Alternatively, if you still want access to the Super key, you can just remap the left Command key to Control and keep the right Command key mapped to the Super key. This is a bit more complicated, and is covered below.

Option key

In Mac OS, the Option key can be used to type special characters. For example, to type é, you press Opt+e, then e. Since I work with words a lot, I find this very useful.

In Linux, however, special characters are accessed using the Compose key. I actually find the Linux way of getting special characters a lot more intuitive; instead of having to remember the key combination to press as in Mac OS, you instead use the Compose key to combine two characters that look like what you want as the end result. For example, to type é in Linux, you type Compose+’, then e. To type è, you type Compose+`, then e. To type €, you type Compose+=, then e. Though still a little tricky, it is a bit easier to figure out than on the Mac.

However, for all this, you need a Compose key, and neither Apple nor Microsoft keyboards have one. So again, you need to map another key to the Compose key. Option is the obvious choice, but you’ll still need the Option key to use as an Alt key. So the solution I found best was to just map the right Option key, which I otherwise never use, to the Compose key.

This is also quite simple to do. Go to System > Preferences > Keyboard, select the Layouts tab, and click the Options button. Expand the Compose key position section, then check the box for Right Alt.

Special function keys

As I mentioned previously, most of the special function keys work out of the box. However, two of them don’t: the Exposé key and the Dashboard key. What’s more, they don’t have a key symbol assigned to them, so you can’t easily remap them.

You may not have a use for these keys, and if so you needn’t bother assigning them. However, if you use an Exposé-equivalent such as the Compiz Fusion Scale, and a Dashboard-equivalent such as the Compiz Fusion Widgets, you’ll probably find it useful to have these key working as expected.

So here’s where things get a bit tricky and we unfortunately have to turn to hacking. First we need to find the key codes for the two keys, then assign them unique key symbols, then assign those key symbols to the function we want.

To find the key codes, I used a program called Xev. You can run it from the terminal by entering the command xev. You’ll then see a small window open up, and your terminal will report any mouse and keyboard interaction with the window. Press the Exposé key and Dashboard key, and the terminal will report a KeyPress and KeyRelease event. It should tell you the key code, followed by a key symbol of NoSymbol:

keycode 128 (keysym 0x0, NoSymbol)

Make a note of the key codes. For my keyboard, the Exposé key was code 128 and the Dashboard key was code 212. Yours will probably be the same.

Next, we assign the key codes to unique key symbols using the xmodmap program. Create a new text file in your home directory named .apple_keys. Add the following two lines and save the file:

keycode 128 = XF86RotateWindows
keycode 212 = XF86Calculator

If your key codes were different than mine, use those ones instead. I chose the above key symbols because they seemed to be the closest symbols to what the keys do, and they’re not assigned to any other keys on the Apple keyboard.

Once your file is saved, re-source it by entering the following command:

$ xmodmap ~/.apple_keys

You’ll probably want to add this line to your ~/.xprofile file (thanks to Shaun for pointing this out) so that it gets sourced whenever you start your computer.

Now, we’re on the home stretch. Open up the settings for your Exposé and Dashboard equivalents and assign your new special function keys to them. If you’re using Compiz Fusion, run the CompizConfig Settings Manager, select Scale, then assign the new Exposé key to the Initiate Window Picker event. Go back to the main menu, select Widget Layer, then assign the new Dashboard key to the Toggle Widget Display event. You’re done!

Keeping the Super key

As I mentioned above, instead of mapping both your Command keys to be Control keys, you may want to keep the Super key around. You might want to just map the left Command key to a Control key, but keep the right Command key as the Super key. Unfortunately, this variation isn’t one of the options in the Gnome keyboard settings, so we’ll have to do it using xmodmap.

Instead of following the above instructions for the Command key, add the following line to the .apple_keys file:

keycode 133 = Control_L

Again, your key code may be different, so just check it using xev as described above.

Re-source the file, and the re-mapping should be complete.

References

My main reason for writing this as because it took me a while to figure out, and when I had to do it a second time I’d forgotten how to do it all. I pieced together the above information using the following separate sources, none of which by themselves told me all the information I needed. That’s life with Linux, though!

Google has announced that they’re discontinuing development on Google Wave. I think this is a real shame, considering it had so much potential. Yet I didn’t use it past the initial novelty phase, and I know exactly why that was: it didn’t integrate well enough with my existing workflow.

Google Wave would have benefited tremendously from full email integration from day one, in my opinion. I heard from a Google insider that the Wave team had such integration working to a degree: you could use Google Wave to communicate with people who didn’t use Google Wave, through their email systems. The experience would be virtually seamless to both the Waver and the emailer. However, Google pulled this feature before launch, as they felt it wasn’t quite ready. Instead, they hoped the community would develop Wave add-ons to interact with non-Wavers email systems.

This meant that on launch, Google Wave was yet another communication tool. It tried to combine Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Talk into one package. This would have been great, if it could integrate with Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Talk. Instead, it doubled up on these platforms, and what’s more it became a jack of all trades and master of none. Full integration with the existing Google products would have, in my opinion, made Wave incredibly useful, and Google should not have relied on third-part developers to provide such a critical element.

Certainly, if I could have used Wave to replace Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Docs, I would be using it today. Because it couldn’t even work with them, let alone replace them, it became an extra distraction that I just didn’t need to use.

Google Wave had potential. If only Google could have realised that potential. As compensation, it at least seems likely that some of the niftier features will wind up in Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Docs before long.

I was using Google Spreadsheets extensively before the update, and it was certainly a chore. There were just way too many bugs: I was constantly closing and re-opening my spreadsheets when they inevitably crashed. Ironically, performance in Google Chrome was abysmal; constant drop-outs and bugs meant it was unusable in Google’s own browser. I resigned myself to using Firefox, and although it was a massive improvement in terms of reliability, it was still quirky to say the least.

The update has fixed nearly every issue I had with the old version. I use it in Google Chrome and it works almost flawlessly. Previously, I would suggest Google Spreadsheets as a free alternative to Microsoft Excel: it wasn’t great, but it was free. Now, Google Spreadsheets is superior to Microsoft Excel. It has all the features I want from Excel, many implemented in a more user-friendly way, and even has some features I’ve been looking for in Excel for years (it’s entirely possible those features already exist in Excel, but due to Excel’s complexity I’ve still been looking for them for years).

Canonical have announced a “new desktop experience” named Unity, and a distribution aimed at dual-boot configurations named Ubuntu Light.

The fact that I had already customized my Gnome set up to an extraordinarily similar configuration means I am fully in support of their work. I had been preparing a blog post describing how I configured my Gnome desktop, but I feel it is unnecessary now: the design settled on by Canonical is pretty much what I have.

The influence from the look-and-feel of the Mac and iPhone is clear. While I don’t necessarily agree with putting the window controls on the left (it seems like they’re doing it just to mimic the Mac, not for any good usability reason), the rest of the design is wonderfully minimal and focused. They also talk in the article of “adopting a single global menu” in the top panel bar: a move that would make the design even more Mac-like.

An operating system like Unity on decent touch-screen hardware could possibly be an alternative to the iPad. Of course, such decent touch-screen hardware doesn’t yet seem to exist outside of the iPad, and the iPad software is far more immersive, but the thoughtful design and attractive graphics mean that Unity could at least have a fighting chance.

Multitasking

Following on from my commentary on multitasking, it seems most pertinent to review iPhone OS 4′s multitasking, a key “tent-pole” feature. In my multitasking post I postulated that Apple would never introduce a multitasking system like that proposed by AppleInsider… and indeed they haven’t, though what they have introduced could be mistaken for AppleInsider’s interpretation.

As I predicted in my follow-up, Apple has introduced multitasking that is completely invisible to the user, and is instead the responsibility of the developer to determine how their app “multitasks”. The seven multitasking services available to developers (background audio, voice over IP, background location, push notifications, local notifications, task completion, fast app switching) mean the multitasking experience needs to be very controlled, and ultimately users never have to concern themselves with managing tasks. They simply return to the home screen to start a new app, then return to the home screen again to return to their previous app.

What most closely resembles AppleInsider’s description is only indirectly related to multitasking. Double-pressing the Home button brings up a quick app switching dock. This is not for managing multitasking, even though Steve Jobs himself describes it as such; instead it is for switching between previously used apps. The difference, I believe, is important. A user does not need to know about this feature at all to gain everything that iPhone multitasking has to offer: if they continue using their iPhones without using the fast app switching, they’ll still be able to multitask. The app-switching feature is instead one of those features that Apple has introduced for power-users: a shortcut that the average user doesn’t need to know about to be able to use the device. I recently posted a list of such power-user shortcuts for iPhone OS 3 on my Tumblr blog.

In John Gruber’s analysis of iPhone OS 4 he says this is somewhat similar to how Android handles multitasking. Yet the restriction of what exactly a multitasking app can do in iPhone OS 4, explicitly requested by the developer, will help preserve iPhone’s battery and performance.

Folders

Again this feature is another power-user feature that an average user doesn’t need to know about at all. It will certainly come in useful… particularly for cleaning away some of those Apple-made apps like Stocks and Weather that I don’t use but can’t remove.

It was during this part of the keynote that Steve Jobs introduced the ability to set a home screen wallpaper. It was obvious this was coming, what with the iPad’s custom wallpapers, but I’m still slightly surprised Apple included it on either the iPhone or the iPad. Of course, all of Apple’s competitor’s have this feature, which is no doubt the main driving force in letting them introduce it. But I believe that Apple’s original reason for not including it was that it allowed the users to make their iPhones look ugly. Without the ability to change the wallpaper, iPhones had a uniform look that really got the brand image out there. People knew exactly what iPhones looked like. Now, the iPhone can look like any old ugly Android phone. It’s no longer iconic. It’s probably a silly objection, and most people will certainly like it, but this still seems like a move that makes the iPhone more like their competition and less like the pinnacle of elegant, minimalist simplicity that the iPhone was.

Mail

The new features in Mail are welcome, yet many of them will typically only affect power-users. The only way you’re going to benefit from a unified inbox and multiple exchange accounts is if you have multiple email addresses you want to check on your phone, and for a lot of iPhone users this just isn’t the case. I’m one of those power-users with multiple email accounts, so I’m very pleased to see these inclusions.

Other additions will benefit everyone, such as threaded emails and opening attachments with apps. To me, the lack of threading was the biggest frustration, since I live by the threaded conversations of both Gmail and Apple Mail in Mac OSX. I hope the threaded conversation view is the default option, so all users can benefit from it.

iBooks

It makes a lot of sense for Apple to have brought the iBooks app to iPhone, even though the user experience won’t be as good as on the iPad. Yet the added revenue they’ll get from all the thousands of iPhone owners who aren’t interested in an iPad. Personally I’m keen on this, as I carry my iPhone everywhere with me, and won’t be carrying my iPad similarly.

Enterprise

The added Enterprise features are sensible additions from Apple’s business point of view, but will not affect the majority of users. Those users who it does affect will see little change in terms of usability, except for the benefit of wirelessly updating apps.

Game Center

Game Center is one of the few additions to iPhone OS 4 that isn’t directly competing with Android. Instead, Scott Forstall makes it clear with a slide that their competition is the Sony PSP, and the Nintendo DS. It’s comparable to Microsoft’s XBox Live, except Apple is introducing it for iPhone before Microsoft can introduce it for Zune and Windows Mobile 7. It will be interesting to see how the game development community embrace the framework, and it will certainly solidify the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad as serious gaming platforms.

iAd: Mobile Advertising

This is no doubt the feature Steve Jobs is most keen on. It’s certainly the most revolutionary addition that is more than just an answer to a competitor. Although it is a direct attack on Google’s income stream, it promises so much more than what Google advertising currently offers. It’s also a dig at Adobe, with the ads made purely in HTML5, not requiring Flash to provide interactive advertising.

Although the whole idea is a little distasteful, I believe iAd will be a renaissance in creative advertising. The Flash ads that currently clutter the web were always limited, and the balance between annoyance and interactivity was rarely achieved. But iAds allow creative advertisers to go to town, and the medium means we’ll see some ads that are just as creative and engaging as television and theatre ads. The interactivity with both the user and the iPhone is unparalleled. Sure, there will be cheap, crappy ads, but creative agencies will surely jump at the chance to make engaging and interesting advertisements for the iPhone. No one admits to liking ads, but if advertising can be fun and engaging, we won’t mind the necessity of it.

Other items

There are a lot of other little tweaks, many of which have been diligently listed by iLounge. Some of the additions I’m most keen to see, and in some cases have been hanging out for, are as follows:

• Bluetooth keyboard support. I have thought this is such a logical addition for so long that I even submitted a suggestion to Apple to include it. Unfortunately for Apple it’s another thing that’s going to make me reconsider the immediate need for an iPad. I’ve often told doubters that the iPhone can do anything a Netbook can do, but in a more convenient way. Now that I’ll be able to touch type on a full-size keyboard, I’ll be firing up my MacBook less and less.
• Playlist creation. I found it frustrating that to fully manage playlists on my iPhone I first needed to do it in iTunes on my computer. There’s still a lot iTunes can do that iPhone can’t, but playlist creation is the only one I found myself wanting to do with regularity. Folder organisations of playlists is welcome as well.
• Calendar views. Only wanting to view some of you calendars at once was a problem before: it was either all your calendars, or only one of them. This restriction had actually led to me removing my work calendar (which is filled with events for a range of things, not all of them relevant to me) from the iPhone and instead duplicating relevant events in my personal calendar. since it cluttered up everything too much. Now I can keep it there but not have to look at it with my other calendars.
• 5x camera zoom. I thought the tap to focus functionality was amazing, and now I can pinch to zoom the camera is even better. Not the best quality, but still so convenient and handy.
• The only minor feature I’d like to see that I haven’t heard anything about is being able to use custom message alerts. I’ve heard a few people say the only reason they jailbroke their iPhones was to have access to this somewhat inconsequential feature, but it looks like we still won’t have it with iPhone OS 4. Not that it particularly worries me, but since most of the reasons to jailbreak have been addressed with iPhone OS 4 it is a notable exclusion.

I’m going to go right out and say I believe this to be false, because if it is true it means Apple will be taking a step backwards with exactly how beautifully simple the iPhone OS experience is. I may be proven wrong and AppleInsider proven correct, but if so I think it will be a huge mistake for Apple to make.

First, I feel I need to explain what multitasking is, since it’s a confusing issue. Multitasking in the mobile software world is not, as you might believe, to do with performing two or more tasks at once. It is simply the ability to leave one application running while attending to another one. This may seem obvious to some, but a recent attempt at humour that compared the features of the iPad to the features of a stone claimed that a stone was capable of multitasking… exactly how they justified this I’m unsure, but any person who knew what multitasking actually meant would not make this claim.

Tech critics have said from the beginning that a major drawback in the iPhone OS is the lack of multitasking. When the iPad was announced, it too was criticised for the same reason. Yet I believe that it is precisely this inability to multitask, and the simplified model of using apps, that makes the iPhone and iPad so brilliantly easy to use. Apple has other reasons for limiting multitasking too: it conserves battery life, and makes it more difficult for malicious code to be run. Simply put, without multitasking the iPhone is more user-friendly, more battery-efficient, and more secure than other mobile operating systems.

The Google Android OS and the Blackberry OS are considered Apple’s main rivals, and both these operating systems feature multitasking in the sense of allowing multiple apps to run at once. Yet this is deceptive, since both Android and Blackberry handsets can only display a single app at a time (as far as I am aware). Android and Blackberry users need to know the difference between quitting an app and switching between apps, and need to be aware of resource management in keeping their multiple apps running smoothly. The iPhone user, being only capable of running a single app at a time, does not need to concern themselves with this at all. On all three handsets, you can only attend to a single app at once, but somehow the ability to leave an app running in the background is seen as an advantage. Additionally, Apple encourages the apps to seamlessly interact with each other where required, and the push notifications introduced in iPhone OS 3.0 means leaving apps running is less of an issue.

A significant attraction to keeping an app running while you attend another is that to quit the first app and start it again would be an annoying inconvenience. It might take a significant amount of time to start, or it might not begin at the same place you left it. These are valid concerns, which is precisely why Apple’s guidelines emphasise quick start-ups and state saving. To quit an iPhone app and start it again should not be any more inconvenient than switching between already running apps.

With this in mind, let’s examine the multitasking method that AppleInsider claims to know about.

Those familiar with the design of iPhone 4.0 said that the user interface will resemble Apple’s desktop Expose [sic] feature, in that a key combination — reportedly hitting the Home button twice — will trigger an expose-like interface that brings up a series of icons representing the currently running apps, allowing users to quickly select the one they want to switch to directly. When a selection is made, the iPhone OS zooms out of the Expose task manager and transitions to that app.

So the proposed method for switching between apps is double-pressing the home button, then tapping the app to switch to. The method for quitting an app and starting a new one is to single-press the home button, then tap the app to switch to. As such, this proposed multitasking method is actually more complicated than just quitting an app and opening another. What’s more, if they use a double-press this means the existing double-press functionality (which opens a specified app such as the phone or the camera) will be replaced. Due to the poor usability both of these observations represent, I believe that even if multitasking is included in iPhone OS 4.0, it will not behave like AppleInsider’s source claims.

What it comes down to is this: do you require multitasking just to make up for the poor performance and state-saving of your handsets’ apps? I certainly don’t. For me, the existing model Apple uses actually allows me to do everything that a “multitasking” handset can do, all while saving battery life and providing a more logical and user-friendly experience.

In short, I will be disappointed if Apple introduces third-party multitasking with iPhone OS 4.0. The lack of multitasking is a feature, not a problem to be fixed. Apple redefined the way we use mobile devices with the iPhone, and they are currently redefining the way we use computers with the iPad. It seems counter-productive to then go and make their operating systems more like the competition’s.

Update: Andy Ihnatko has posted a commentary on multitasking. In it, he describes a situation which I have neglected: a third-party app, like a music player, that you want to play in the background while working in other apps. Admittedly my view that there will not be any multitasking in the next iPhone OS fails to remedy this.

Yet I still believe the method that AppleInsider posts will be nothing more than a rumour: it just complicates things way more than Apple would ever let things get. Instead, I propose an alternative: Apple adds a feature to the iPhone SDK that gives developers the ability to let their users explicitly request the app continue to run in the background. Then, there is no need to switch between running apps using an Exposé-like feature: you’ll just press the Home button to return to the Home screen, and tapping the app’s icon again will return you to the app in its still-running state. It needs to work exactly like the iPod app, or it will be too weird.

For example, with Andy Ihnatko’s music-streaming example app, you might be playing music then hit the Home button. Instead of quitting and returning to the Home screen, a message pops up asking “Would you like to continue playing music after leaving the app?” Hitting “Continue playing” will allow the music to keep streaming while you run other apps, being interrupted in a similar way to the iPod app’s playing, while hitting “Quit” will quit the app as normal. This means the experience is no more confusing to the user, and instead the responsibility is put on the developer to make the experience work perfectly, as it should be. Similar methods could work for messaging apps: “Would you like to stay signed in after leaving the app?”

I suppose my initial disgust at the thought of multitasking mostly belongs to AppleInsider’s explanation of how it will work. There are other ways Apple could implement it without damaging the user experience. But once the user is consciously aware of switching between running and non-running apps, the user experience fails dramatically compared to what we currently have.

Update (9 April)
OK, iPhone OS 4 has been presented, and as predicted AppleInsider was wrong… mostly. I’ll cover my full thoughts on iPhone OS 4 in another post soon.

This blog post is a little old but what it had to say resonated strongly with me.

I use Gnome for my Linux desktop, but there is no denying that it needs some serious design changes. I choose not to use KDE for the same reason the original poster does: it is just too much like Windows Vista. At least Gnome is trying to do something slightly different, even if they are failing.

I’m working on a follow-up to this post that covers how I have customised my Gnome desktop. I feel I’ve made it a lot more usable; it certainly is an improvement on the default look-and-feel of Gnome. Again, as the original poster points out, I could join the community and contribute my ideas that way. But Open Source communities are notoriously resistant to the suggestions of an outsider, and I really have no interest in getting up to my elbows in coding. So hopefully the Gnome team will come around to a better solution eventually.