[Windicators] would follow the same styling as Ayatana indicators: Semantically colored: with red for critical problems, orange for alerts, green for positive status changes and blue for informative states that are not the default or usual state.

This came as a real surprise given that I had (and still have) never seen a blue or orange indicator icon.

The obvious and primary objection is that four colors in a palette to convey meaning is far too many. Shuttleworth even said as late as April 1 — just four weeks before Lucid’s release — “Personally, my expectation is that green vs orange/red is as far as we want to go.” Two colors is an absolute maximum here — one for negative messages about something being broken, the other merely to notify you of something — although even one should suffice: “Something has changed; requesting your attention.”

If “orange is for alerts” and “green is for positive status changes,” then why do new IM messages turn the messaging icon green? Isn’t that an alert? What is “positive” about getting a new message? What if it’s your boss firing you? Your boyfriend breaking up with you? A spambot?

If red is “for critical problems,” why does your sound indicator icon turn red when something’s trying to play while it’s muted? Is that really “critical”? Doesn’t that deserve something more accurately described as “an alert” (orange)?

Furthermore, if it’s up to the application developers to specify the “severity” of an alert — which is not even an accurate description of the purpose of these colors, as they’re not a spectrum of severity, but rather a whole handful of messages — will this not result in a great deal of inconsistency? If one application feels that its behavior is more important than that of other applications, it can choose to make its indicator icon red rather than green (or orange or blue) on an event. And, more fundamentally, you’re placing a burden on developers who wish to use indicator icons for alerts to choose from among four different states, rather than just coding for “Alter the color of my [w]indicator icon to whatever the user’s desktop theme calls for.”

It even appears as though this “spec” isn’t complete; Rhythmbox’s indicator icon is black when playing, gray when not playing (under the Radiance theme). What does gray mean? Before I started writing this blog post, in fact, I’d have guessed it meant that Rhythmbox was minimized, as I frequently see a gray icon when Rhythmbox is hidden. Turns out I was wrong, and that’s after using Lucid and Rhythmbox daily for three months.

The intent behind the specification is flawed for those and probably other reasons, and the execution is flawed as well. If you inspect the colors of the green and red indicator icon colors — I couldn’t manage to turn any of them blue or orange, so if you have, please leave a comment — you’ll see that green is #4dcb00 and red is #dc0000. I imagine we’ll never know why these colors were chosen, but something is revealed in the choice of that green in particular.

“Ubuntu Aubergine” has a hue (in RGB colorspace) of 328. Just opposite that on the color wheel — the most basic color complement pair you can find — is a color with a hue value of 81: a particular shade of green. And not the shade being used by indicator icons.

That’s right: even though the indicator icon color spec called for a shade of green, and even though there is a shade of green directly opposite Ubuntu Aubergine on the color wheel, Canonical’s designers chose an utterly arbitrary shade of green with a hue of 95.

Astonishingly, the original proposal for a green coloring of a new indicator message was closer to the Ubuntu Aubergine complement than the final implementation (with a hue of 72, just 9 degrees from the “correct” hue). It’s worth noting, of course, that Ubuntu Aubergine had not been formalized and documented at this point (nor had it been as of April 28.)

It’s also worth mentioning that a green hue of 104 is triadically complementary to the pair of colors of Ubuntu Orange and Ubuntu Aubergine. So either of these two greens — 81 and 104 — could work in theory. But neither was used.

Finding red and blue complements is a bit more difficult, making stronger the case for a single notification color. Although “blue” is a complement of “orange,” Ubuntu Orange isn’t quite “orange” enough to have a 180° blue complement. The best I could manage is a hue of 191, which is a triadic complement of Ubuntu Orange with a 42° differential (the same as that between Ubuntu Aubergine and Ubuntu Orange). The “proper” red would be just between Ubuntu Aubergine and Ubuntu Orange, or a hue of 351. The current red has a hue of 0 — i.e., pure red — which should come as no surprise. Red = red, right Canonical?

Still, I contend that one color should suffice, and in that case, Ubuntu Orange is probably the way to go, if the plan is to continue with an Ubuntu Aubergine desktop wallpaper and Ubuntu Orange highlights in the GTK theme.

The important point to take away from this is that the current colors are symptomatic of a lack of concern for fundamental design practices within the Canonical design community. The hues of green I’ve mentioned, for instance, may be indistinguishable to most users in practice (even to designers, given the size of the icons), but that I’ve so easily shown them not to be “correct” is alarming.

Foursquare’s friend finder was straightforward and I was able to add three or four people. Gowalla’s, on the other hand, misled me into sending an invite to all 947 people in my Google contacts. This includes people I bought stuff from on Craigslist; old bosses; old girlfriends; co-workers; probably even prospective employers.

The trick was in mimicking a fairly standard “Step 2″ format for these types of functions. It appears that I’m being presented two choices here: the first, to begin following only those contacts who are already on Gowalla; the second, to send invite emails to all checked names in the list.

Instead, both buttons do exactly the same thing. So when I clicked the button at the top, an email was sent to every person on that list. There was no pop-up window telling me, “You are about to send an email to 947 people. Continue?”

Fortunately I hadn’t used my full name on my profile; the email people received came from no-reply@gowalla.com or something similar; and I deleted my profile as soon as I realized what had happened. So hopefully I wasn’t as incriminated as I may have otherwise been. I know I roll my eyes whenever a friend has fallen for an obvious trap like that. And I like to think I’m pretty good at spotting these tricks. But this layout is outright deceptive.

Now however details are starting to emerge. OMG! Ubuntu! describes how to get a bootleg copy of it. And at UDS back in May, Bruno Maag gave a session entitled “Making Beautiful Fonts” in which he elaborated on the creation of the new font. There is now video of that session, as well as the slides, which were sadly not included in the frame.

My first impression is that it feels a bit too stiff, rigid, and tech-y. Of course there’s no way to tell until you use it on your desktop. Reassuring, however, that they’re giving it proper italics.

If you’re feeling paranoid or would just like to try the latest Flash 10.1 release candidate, you can download it from Adobe, and follow the install instructions from Web Upd8.

Update: The final 10.1 release from Adobe has hit the main Ubuntu repositories. A software update should do it.

Several of these fonts are better served by some Ubuntu defaults, and still others — Gill Sans, Optima, Caslon, Tahoma, and more — have decent substitutes just waiting in the repositories. Typography plays a greater role in user experience than I think most people working on Ubuntu realize, and it should be a goal of 10.10 to elevate this part of the OS as much as possible. This requires just a few extra kilobytes in packages and some changes/additions to the files in /etc/fonts/conf.d/. In a subsequent post I’ll be cataloging what those changes should be.

But it’s important to recognize first of all that this is a significant part of the reason that many find Ubuntu (and Linux in general) to have a “cheap” look. In many cases I even see serifs standing in place of sans-serifs, whose small sizes make the serifs nearly illegible where a sans would read just fine. And the poor substitutions and meager range of reproducible fonts makes for a very flat experience — when everything’s in either Liberation Sans or DejaVu Serif, it’s hard not to feel that you’re getting a crippled version of the web. These problems are the result of a sheer lack of concern for how words are presented on-screen. Now more than ever they need to be addressed, as much (if not the majority) of computing now takes places in a browser.

I also want to stress that this is not a matter of personal preference; unlike my insistence upon no hinting — which I admit was subjective, but which I played up for effect — these substitutions are plainly incorrect. Sure, you may prefer that Google’s pages show up in, say, Bitstream Charter, and you’re free to make that the case. But when the intentions of web designers are so poorly adhered to by Ubuntu’s defaults, it results in a major communications gap.

This is also not a burden to place on the web designers. For one thing, they can’t be blamed for designing for Windows and Mac, when those OSes account for over 95% of their users. Virtually everybody has Verdana, and they can’t reasonably be expected to look up the Linux equivalent for every nearly universal font they want to invoke — if such a reference were to exist in the first place. Second, when it is perfectly within our power to rectify the communication of type between websites and a default user, then we owe it to ourselves to do so as the contributors to a Linux distribution whose explicit goal is to gain traction with the layperson. While Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular offer several practical advantages over Mac and Windows, you can’t win hearts and minds without the polished exterior of a carefully considered and meticulously refined visual experience. And type is of paramount urgency for that experience.

But what’s Ubuntu Aubergine?

Avant Garde Demi-Bold and Book Condensed. I think. I’m not sure about that capital ‘G’ though.

Other than the type, I think I like it.

The person who eventually ended up with the lost iPhone was sitting next to Powell. He was drinking with a friend too. He noticed Powell on the stool next to him but didn’t think twice about him at the time. Not until Powell had already left the bar, and a random really drunk guy—who’d been sitting on the other side of Powell—returned from the bathroom to his own stool.

The Random Really Drunk Guy pointed at the iPhone sitting on the stool, the precious prototype left by the young Apple engineer.

“Hey man, is that your iPhone?” asked Random Really Drunk Guy.

“Hmmm, what?” replied the person who ended up with the iPhone. “No, no, it isn’t mine.”

“Ooooh, I guess it’s your friend’s then,” referring to a friend who at the time was in the bathroom. “Here, take it,” said the Random Really Drunk Guy, handing it to him. “You don’t want to lose it.” After that, the Random Really Drunk Guy also left the bar.

I have a pretty strong suspicion that this “Really Random Drunk Guy” is a fabrication of the guy who found the iPhone — “I didn’t pick it up; it was handed to me.”

I think I even saw Pierce Brosnan’s adjectival “fucking” dubbed over with “sodding.”