Orange icon, we love you

As many of you already know, Jaunty brought a small but significant change in the Ubuntu user interface: the beloved updates icon doesn’t show up anymore. In its place, the Update Manager will automatically open under the current windows.

The pop under technique is well known to any of you surfing porn highly advertised websites, once you close your current applications you’ll notice there’s a new window underneath.

Also, since the use of the technique is a (purposely) slightly more obstrusive, the limit of once a week has been set. Translated, even if newer updates are available, the update manager won’t automatically popup before 7 days since the last automatic appearance.

An awful lot of people didn’t like the change. More clearly said, the new behaviour has been marked as a regression. The numbers are quite impressing: 300+ comments on the main bug, and 27 duplicated bugs !

The planned behaviour

I’m currently unable how much of this has been effectively deployed, but what follows is how the whole is planned to behave:

• When security updates are available, Update Manager should open automatically within one day, and display those security updates plus any non-security updates that happen to be available. Test procedure: …
• When non-security-only updates are available, Update Manager should open automatically whichever is later: (a) one week after it was last open, whether that was manually or automatically, or (b) one week after updates were installed by any apt-powered method, including apt-get or aptitude (bug 334952). Test procedure: …
• When no updates are available, Update Manager should not open automatically at all. Test procedure: …
• When Add/Remove Applications, Synaptic, or a similar graphical tool is open (i.e. if apt/dpkg is locked) at the moment Update Manager would be scheduled to open, it should wait until they are closed (bug 334935). Test procedure: …

Also, since the new timed behavior may disappoint some, a preference dialog is planned. Here’s a mockup:

Why has that been done ?

I have been able to find out the following reasons:

• The new notifications system doesn’t allow to position bubbles anymore. That means that the old bubble containing the message ‘Click the icon to..’ has become suddenly dangerously confusing.
• And that could not be fixed with an interactive notification since the NotifyOSD also forbids interaction by design.
• The old icon is considered not obvious in meaning nor evident enough for new users
• A perceived advantage of the new method is that it requires just one click to perform the update, and on a much larger target than the 22px update icon.
• removing the notification icon will unclutter a bit the tray icon.

In a way, NotifyOSD somewhat forced the change. A little design change that forces to rethink another aspect, in a chain that may change in better or worse the whole experience.

Is there any problem with the new behavior ?

I believe so, like the many people who reported or commented the bug, I have some problem with it:

• invading the user workspace with unsolicited windows is seen as a sacrilege nowadays, and for good reasons. The whole point of using a tray icon was avoiding being obstrusive in any way.
• The popup even if unfocused, gets in the middle of your alt+tab flow
• updating now requires just one click. But if you want to skip it you also have to click instead of just waiting for the bubble to disappear.
• in the latter case, you’re left with no mnemonic note of the need to upgrade. You’re likely to forget it until the following week.
• ..and you’re left with no easy way to perform the upgrade. You have to look for the update manager in the menus. That’s even less trivial for a novice.
• as a result of the need to throttle the frequency of the update manager pop up, we need yet another configuration dialog.
• the proposed solution not to be bothered with the popup is to disable automatic update checking. Is this a joke ?
• having to artificially manage the frequency of the popup unnecessarily introduces a lag between the udpates deployment and the updates receptions by the user.
• popping a windows is abused (on the internet especially) and is likely to many users nerves.
• reverting to the old behaviour is not supported and won’t likely be present in future releases.

Will this be fixed ?

Well, Shuttleworth, after long discussions, marked the bug as wont-fix.

Frankly, considering the numbers of the protest and the good points raised, this doesn’t really show off any capability of Canonical to listen to their users.

Don’t take me wrong on this one, you sure have to develop a vision and pursue that, but you should still be able to acknowledge you mistakes.

It’s also pretty weird to popup the update manager because updating is important, and at the same time throttling it, consider the tray icon clutter while removing the only mnemonic of having an non-updated system.

My proposal

Since seems they’re not gonna go back on that one, I proposed to mix the old and new behaviour.

The orange icon should appear immediately. The update manager pop ups after, say, 2 days and maximum once a week.
That way novices would get the popup and expert users (since they’re supposed to upgrade often) are likely to never see it or at least see it less.

Also the orange icon would give the user an easy way to update if they accidentally close the update manager (or purposely postpone the upgrade).

The advantages of such approach:

• all the code required is likely to be already there.
• has no disadvantage for beginners
• is likely to appeal expert people at least a little bit more.

Before you comment, I perfectly know the issue has been over discussed. But since I still see people coming up with incredibly complex solution to get rid of the pop ups I felt urged to propose mine.

Should you have a proposal, why not adding it to the dedicated BrainStorm page ?