Ubuntu 12.04 To Include Head-Up Display Menus 449
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 thought it was for "human beings". (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I liked Ubuntu when it was "polished" Debian (Score:3, Interesting)
Now Mark Shuttleworth is well on his way to being the next Steve Jobs, for good or for bad.
And I've gone back to Debian, which is a huge relief after the crushing disappointments that were the last few version of Ubuntu.
In a year or two I expect Ubuntu to be as "open source" as IOS...
linux for dummies (Score:1, Interesting)
Canonical is dummyfying linux so even windows users can use it, or so they hope, probably in vain. They don't care that linux users will move on to other distributions.
Re:Too fast ! (Score:4, Interesting)
You claim to be able use Unity, so I have to ask: Did they fix the multi-workspace issue where the bar showing all your running apps show them all, not just the apps running in the current workspace? Because there's little point in having multiple workspaces if the bar showing programs doesn't make any difference between them..
That's one of my biggest grudges against Unity.
Re:LTS? (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually seems like the opposite situation to me. If you are introducing such a far reaching goal you probably want as much time to work on it as possible and an LTS would give you that time.
The thing that really astounds me here is the fact that the feature is application specific. That means that every application will have this feature implemented downstream, at Canonical. That seams like an awfully large piece of beef jerky to bite off right there.
Re:Too fast ! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Innovation (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [mozillalabs.com] 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.
Re:Too fast ! (Score:5, Interesting)
My father's been using Ubuntu for years, and really likes it; he prefers it to Windows. As he's not a Linux geek and installing Linux in such a way as to reliably not wreck anything else on the system is still not foolproof, I've been managing the system for him.
I've been holding off on upgrading him since Unity came out; he's running the last LTS from before that. But that's getting a bit long in the tooth, so when the recent version came out I showed him Unity and Gnome 3. He loathes them both, calling them childish --- he particularly dislikes the huge, unlabelled icons. Eventually we found the (highly non-intuitive) way to shrink the Unity dock bar icons and he says he can live with it, but he really just wants the old Ubuntu back. Gnome 3 he thought was unspeakable. No task bar, no minimise, and above all he dislikes having the dock on a different screen. (He wasn't keen on the Unity launcher screen, either.)
But this is the really telling thing: I tried him out on various systems, to see which one he liked best. His favourite? Haiku.
Re:"...without having to relearn menus" (Score:4, Interesting)
I beg to differ: Computers are tools, and when these tools do the job we need them to do, and in a way that satisfies/pleases us, then turning the world upside down is not just counter productive, but unnecessary, and will meet with push back or even rejection. Change for the sake of change seems to be the rage these days, perhaps because "different" is often mistaken as a synonym for "improvement."
A real improvement would either be so obviously better that everybody will realize it at first sight, even if it's dramatically different; or it would offer the improvement above and beyond the existing functionality without throwing existing users for a loop.
I would hope that the typed menus under discussion are of the latter type, not the former.
Re:stuff that doesn't work (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems they went out of their way to make things more difficult, to hide as much as possible and make it much more tortuous to do simple things.
That's MS's MO and one of the reasons I avoid Microsoft whenever possible. It's easier to convert (brainwise) from XP to KDE than it is from XP to Win7. I have Win 7 on my newish notebook (I really ought to get off my lazy butt and put Linux on it), and several things are incredible annoyances that are complete downgrades from XP.
Control Panel -- whoever designed Win 7's control panel needs a good swift kick in the ass. What took two clicks in XP takes 7 in 7.
File Manager -- great, now I can't sort files by extension or by time if they're oggs or wavs -- and I have lots and lots of oggs and wavs.
Search -- Christ but they ruined that completely. Search has gone from "pretty bad" to "completely useless."
The more I use that OS the more I hate it.