Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 09 March 2010 10:33
Opinion and Analysis
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There are times when one gets the feeling that the good folk at Canonical who design and develop the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution have got their heads screwed on the right way.
There are other times when one wonders where they got some of the ideas that they implement.
Right through its existence, Ubuntu has sported a dusty brown visage. There have been some variations, that have brought the colour closer to that of a baby's bowel movement, but it has never left brown and yellow far behind. Change was called for and it has finally arrived.
Now, it has turned purple. Deep purple in parts, light in others, a kind of shaded background that is neither here nor there. I can live with it - but who chose the desktop theme which constitutes the default?
The theme chosen displays all type on the desktop in reverse. Are the people at Canonical unaware that the human eye has never been comfortable with masses of reverse type? Of course, reverse type looks "cool" and the juvenile types, who have hormones to burn, love it.
When one types an address into the Firefox address bar, the remembered URLs come up - and while the names of the sites are in reverse and readable, the actual URLs are a bright shade of blue. Bright blue type on a dark background. Readability at its best.
