We previously posted about some new Unity customization tools like Ubuntu Tweak, MyUnity and Gnome Tweak Tool. In case you missed them you can find them here. The series ended with MyUnity getting the most number of points. Well the review was based on MyUnity 3.0. The developers of MyUnity have released a new video (a teaser) showcasing the features of MyUnity 4.0. You can see the video below.

Despite being a short video, you can notice quite a number of differences. Until now, most Unity customization tools are mostly similar. You are provided with a set of options and then you change them to see the desired effect on your desktop. However, MyUnity 4.0 takes a more radical and unique approach to this. Rather than tweaking the settings, you directly makes changes to your desktop in the edit mode where the software influence itself is minimal.

How is this beneficial?

1. This way you can quickly make the changes directly to the components of your desktop rather than search for that settings option in the MyUnity interface. It is more intuitive. Imagine a scenario where you want to decrease the size of your launcher. You can now directly go and drag until you get the perfect size.

2. No worries about GTK integration since the graphical user interface (GUI) is hardly visible. So no worries about MyUnity not blending nicely with the desktop themes.

This is all great, but are there any drawbacks of this new approach?

Well for one, it is actually too early to talk much about the pros and cons of this change. One probable issue could be discoverability. With MyUnity 3.0 and before, users were presented with all the options that they could change. But now, the user customizes the settings which he thinks can be changed. However there could be more customization options which he was not aware of.

But I am sure, the developers will have definitely considered this issue. It is way too early to pin in on the application. For now we can trust their judgment and believe they will indeed come up with a solution to this.

MyUnity focuses on one thing “Customizing Unity” and does a good job at it. It opens up many customization options for the regular user and tries to disprove one important assumption made by the community which is “Unity is not configurable to your liking”. Except for the option of moving the launcher many other options like global menu etc..are already in the pipeline. You can already customize everything related to the launcher appearance like color, size of icons, icons lighting, launcher auto-hide behavior.