So, I’m generally real happy with Jaunty. It’s fast (well, except for the Intel driver regressions, but only one of my machines is affected, and the speed hit doesn’t really matter on that one), Pidgin doesn’t randomly start leaking memory and crash, and I totally dig the new logout/status applet deal. Very nice. I even like the new notification system. It’s clearly not fully baked, but it’s a good direction. I really don’t like the new indicator applet however. It looks like a little envelope, and if I have any sort of communication event a little green dot appears on it. The idea is that there is one indicator for a number of events, but now I can’t just look at it and instantly know which application had an event and know where to go, I have to click on it and open the even list to know what I need to give attention to, or just shuffle through my apps to see what’s up. This is a major regression in usability! On top of that, because it looks the same regardless of the event that has occurred, I can’t tell if something actually needs attention or not.
Anyway, I’m generally happy with the direction things have gone in 9.04, but they really need to make sure that this stuff is fully baked in the next release and these usability regressions are fixed, or they’re going to really alienate a lot of users.
