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Ubuntu 12.04 To Include Head-Up Display Menus
For the first few years of its existence, it would have been fair to say that Canonical was essentially polishing, packaging and publishing Debian Linux (and Gnome) to create the base Ubuntu desktop, to great acclaim. For the past few years, though, the company has pushed new looks and new applications (cf. Unity and Ubuntu TV), and refused to stick with prettifying existing interfaces. Now, Barence writes with this excerpt from PC Pro: "Ubuntu is set to replace the 30-year-old computer menu system with a 'Head-Up Display' that allows users to simply type or speak menu commands. Instead of hunting through drop-down menus to find application commands, Ubuntu's Head-Up Display lets users type what they want to do into a search box. The system suggests possible commands as the user begins typing – entering 'Rad' would bring up the Radial blur command in the GIMP art package, for example. HUD also uses fuzzy matching and learns from past searches to ensure the correct commands are offered to users. Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth told PC Pro the HUD will make it easier for people to learn new software packages, and migrate from Windows to Linux software without having to relearn menus. The HUD will first appear in Ubuntu 12.04."
I've been doing this for years... so much, in fact, that I have no idea where most menu entries are on my Windows and Linux boxes, and I'm sure many don't even have menu entries. My wife can't navigate my desktops.
I hit "F2" and type commands on Gnome/Linux, and hit "r" all the time. It makes me look like a hacker and is really intimidating to inexperienced users watching me.
Expecting the user to know which command they want - especially in Linux where most program names have nothing to do with their functionality - just seems like a very strong turn in the opposite direction that Ubuntu has been taking.
Isn't 12.04 supposed to be the next LTS release? Seems like they've gone far wayward from their original goals if they're introducing such huge new projects into what's supposed to be a stable, reliable release that enterprises can trust. It would be a better idea to introduce it in 12.10, surely?
CheShA: Manchester Breakcore / Drill and Bass Yes I'm a s
has had this for decades. M-x allows you to enter a command by name, with tab completion.
Replacing the 30 year old GUI with the 40 year old CLI*.
(*plus autocomplete, yay)
Indeed, there is something wrong with everyone ditching mature products... So now Unity is "ok". I found that after adapting myself to it, it works. Not as great as Gnome2 did, but I can live with it as a default desktop. However, they're going to change even more. I wrote about this mindset a while ago.. For the TL;DR crowd: Mature software is not seen as something "good" but as "something to be replaced". It's a sad time we live in.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Why are we introducing a dramatically new interface feature for a long-term support (LTS) release?
"For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme."
s/radios/linux/g ; s/listening to/running/
Nearly there. Time to start spinning in your grave, Mr. Adams.
Philip
-- Any sufficiently advanced level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice
Generally, the "Obligatory XKCD" meme requires that the XKCD in question have some relation to the subject at hand....
Agreed. It's fashionable to decry any new UI ideas as stupid. And indeed many UI redesigns are a step backwards, or purely aesthetic, or confusing, ... I'm not a fan of Unity, for instance. But we have to be at least somewhat open to new UI ideas, or computer interaction will never move forward.
This particular idea seems really good to me. In fact it's something I've been wanting for a long time. There have been small pushes in this direction (e.g. the Ubiquity add-on for Firefox would let you type commands (like "map XXX" or "email page to XXX") and get immediately useful results), but for it to really work, from a user perspective, it has to be available in every application so that it's worth the cost to learn the new style.
Being able to search the menu structure is really powerful, especially for applications with loads of commands (photo editors, word processors, etc.). I've lost count of the amount of time I've wasted searching through menus for a command that I use infrequently. I know it exists, I've used it before... but does it count as a "Filter" or an "Adjustment" or an "Edit"? Why can't I just search for it? Moreover, I shouldn't have to train myself to remember where it was put. Once you get used to typing commands, it can be extremely fast to do so, becoming almost as fast as a keyboard shortcut. (Obviously this will be more the case in applications where your hands are already on the keyboard, like word processors; it could be slow in applications like photo-editing where your hand is usually on the mouse...)
The ability to rapidly invoke commands via the keyboard is something that I would think most slashdotters would love: it adds back in some of the power of the commandline. It also inherently streamlines across applications (you should be able to just type "Save" or "Preferences" in any application and get the expected behavior, regardless of where they put the menu item. If they're smart, they'll kind synonyms, so that "Options" and "Preferences" map to each other...)
While I am excited about all this, they do need to leave, in my opinion, the usual menu bar accessible and visible. The reason is simple: during the initial learning phase of an application, you don't even know what's possible. You need some way to explore the available commands, see what the app can do, and experiment. Only once you're somewhat familiar with the application does it make sense to quickly invoke commands with the keyboard.
I actually like Gnome 3 better than Gnome 2. I bitched about it at first. But it improved my productivity. Sometimes we only resist change because we are used to something. True, change for change's sake is not necessarily good. But sometimes you have to experiment with new things. Otherwise, you can't find a better way of doing what you always did before. The old way of doing things is often based on the limitations of the time. It's good that we keep distros and desktop environments that apply the old ways. But it doesn't mean that the new way may not be better.
And sometimes the new way is not all that new. It seems to me that the new heads up display is very much like what I usually do anyways... Alt-F2 and call my fav. command. That was true to call an application why can it not be true about a menu command? Sometimes the menu command is easy to figure out, but where it is being kept is hard. And lots of time is wasted in finding it.
It's actually an old interface if you think about it. The first version of AutoCAD I knew (for DOS) had this command line that you could use in conjunction with the mouse. It increased productivity back then enormously for not forcing you to constantly wave the mouse back and forth between the menu and where it needs to be. Once you memorize the commands it just works. And guess what? AutoCAD still has that function. Since the 1980s. It's probably what has kept it as the top CAD solution (at least in civil engineering it is) despite its price tag. The command line is awesome. Now, Ubuntu proposes in essence to carry on that power (no quite, I'm sure you can't just cut and paste a string of commands from the clipboard thus making a spreadsheet a preferred interface of mine to AutoCAD) to pretty much every application. I think it is awesome. I think it is not new, and about time that it was done. Watch out AutoDesk. AutoCAD may end up having some competition through no fault of their own (the competitors, I mean).
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
I support users... Users will be using Unity, I need to know it. The world doesn't revolve around me.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)