Ubuntu Project founder Mark Shuttleworth has revealed the Linux-based operating system's next big step: replacing the menu paradigm. The HUD works like a system-wide search box in the vein of Alfred or LaunchBar for Mac, but returns commands within nested menus. For example, bringing up the HUD and typing "D" would return results including "Edit > Delete" or "File > Open > DVD_cover_300DPI," like the Help search field in OS X. The system is designed to streamline the process of using menus, saving the time of physically looking for what you need on the screen — you don't need to know what folder or subheading to dive into. It certainly looks sleek in motion, though we wonder how easy it will be to use if you don't know what you're looking for — the good news is that the traditional menus will be displayed in the panel. The HUD should work for any standard Ubuntu app with global menu support when version 12.04 is released in April, and the ultimate goal is for it to replace the menu in all Unity applications. Shuttleworth says that the next step for the HUD is integrating voice control, along with gestures and touch.
HUD in Ubuntu v12.04 to eventually replace the menu
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And this is relevant to me because…?
Sidenote: Ubuntu is not the entirety of the Linux community, and to equate a feature of one as a feature of all is a fallacy.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 2:02 AM EST reply Recommend (1) Flag actions
First of all, you are rude
Second. I am glad someone if thinking about how to make GUIs better. This will work really well with voice input
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 2:06 AM EST reply Recommend (12) Flag actions
..which absolutely nobody uses, or will use any time soon.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 2:16 AM EST reply Recommend (1) Flag actions
it works just as well with a keyboard, but the current GUIs are terrible with voice control, that is why i pointed it out.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 2:24 AM EST reply Recommend (3) Flag actions
Um, if this was an apple post about Siri, you’d be singing a different song.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 10:31 AM EST reply Recommend (3) Flag actions
I am sick of haters bringing Apple into every conversation of technology. If someone doesn’t like some new feature, you just assume that it is because apple did not build it. In a way I think you are just jealous of the fact that how successful Apple is. And you know what my man Drake says, Jealousy is love and hate at the same time.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 1:38 PM EST reply Recommend (1) Flag actions
As in, you and Drake are dating?
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 4:22 PM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
just heard about this on tech news today-
very cool looking! i mapped the OSX help menu search to a shortcut key and use it quite regularly, this seems like the next logical step. the fuzzy matching and learning your usage pattern is pretty badass.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 2:02 AM EST reply Recommend (2) Flag actions
You really should try Quicksilver + UI Access plugin. Works better than Help menu search in my opinion :) For example, you could access not only the current application’s menu items but all open applications’… And Quicksilver itself can of course do much more than just menu search,
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 3:15 AM EST reply Recommend (1) Flag actions
Just so everyone knows, the Mac OS X shortcut to search the help menu is CMD + Shift + /
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 10:35 AM EST reply Recommend (1) Flag actions
Oof, I should have mentioned this. Thank you :)
Another fun tidbit, you can remap that (and just about any shortcut) in System Prefs > Keyboard. I think I have my Menu Search mapped to option + escape.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 12:20 PM EST reply Recommend (1) Flag actions
I would be fine with this if they weren’t making it so darn difficult to stick with classic GNOME.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 2:07 AM EST reply Recommend (3) Flag actions
http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2011/09/11/install-the-classic-desktop-in-ubuntu-11-10/
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 4:11 AM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
No wonder Ubuntu is losing popularity by the week. Experimental, non-intuitive crap nobody wants isn’t the way to make a niche product more accessible.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 2:17 AM EST reply Recommend (3) Flag actions
Because menu bars and walls of links are so much more useful. This is a time-saver in every way (oh, except for those with tablets – oops).
This is a power-user’s dream, regardless of OS. The fact that it’s integrated so fully almost makes me want to switch full-time to Ubuntu (until I realize how much of my software still requires Windows). Such integrated searching should be made available on all OS platforms.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 2:33 AM EST reply Recommend (5) Flag actions
But Ubuntu is trying to be more accessible and attract new users. The hidden menus in 11.04 are confusing enough for first time users. this is much worse. How will a new user find something that he/she doesn’t know exists?
And this can apply to power-users too. Say you are an expert in Inkscape, but the next version comes with a bunch of new options, with the traditional menu you would click the menu, see there’s a new option and click on it to see what it does. How will you find them with this? start typing the alphabet and see if anything new pops up?
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 4:25 AM EST reply Recommend (3) Flag actions
This new HUD is not a power user’s dream AT ALL.
1) Menus are inherently explorable, hierarchical concepts. Where is the discoverability in HUD? Just keep typing until something comes up that look right?
2) Menus and their items can have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them. You then have instant access via a couple of keystrokes to the command. This sure as hell beats opening up the HUD then starting to type the name of the item. Even if the shortcuts are retained with HUD, how are you going to discover them?!
3) The HUD requires you to know the exact name of the item. If it’s ‘Remove’ or ‘Cut’ instead of ‘Delete’ you’re out of luck.
4) Menus can be accessed by keyboard, mouse or touch. With HUD, it’s your keyboard or nothing.
I could go on.
Menus have been around for decades. They are intuitive, aid exploration of a program’s features, and are probably one of the best-understood parts of an operating system’s user interface. Replacing them now with a noddy autocomplete drop-down is simply laughable.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 8:16 PM EST reply Recommend (1) Flag actions
This radical of a change shouldn’t happen in-between OS versions. I’m on the side that hates Unity, and I know I’ll hate this. It’s just too much change in too short a time period.
If they could just give us the option to run Gnome 2 or have a more complete fall-back mode for Gnome 3 I’d be ok with it.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 2:40 AM EST reply Recommend (1) Flag actions
http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2011/09/11/install-the-classic-desktop-in-ubuntu-11-10/
I’m also fairly certain you can remove Unity entirely, which will fall back on Gnome 3, but I could be wrong. This will probably help:
http://linux-software-news-tutorials.blogspot.com/2011/10/ubuntu-1110-oneiric-remove-unity-and.html
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 4:14 AM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
I’ve found most things are still doable in fallback mode. The main difference seems to be that many of the right-click options are now ALT+right click.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 4:20 AM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
This will be great for Ubuntu TV.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 3:21 AM EST reply Recommend (1) Flag actions
Love it, makes me work a lot faster!
More keyboard and less mouse is the way to go for me, just dont think it should be a replacement.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 3:38 AM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
You do know that you can access menus with your keyboard, right? And popular commands have keyboard shortcuts, too.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 8:17 PM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
Seeing this makes me very glad I dumped Unity on the Ubuntu systems I use at home and work. I keep Alfred around on my Mac because Apple’s made Spotlight utterly useless in recent years, but I’ve never liked using either Alfred or Quicksilver as menu replacements. At least they were optional though. Personally, Unity in general feels like a backwards step in every regard, and this seems to be aimed at a keyboard power-user niche. Gnome 3 despite all it’s problems and current stability issues seems far more promising to me.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 4:07 AM EST reply Recommend (1) Flag actions
Oh dear, this looks usable ONLY if you know what to look for, i.e. 10% of the cases. I personally have a photographic memory, not a textual. I remember under which menu did I see one or another function, but not necessarily how it was called. What about other languages? Sometimes the translations are very unintuitive, which will make it impossible to find what you need. And lastly – what about feature discovery. What if I downloaded a demo of a new app and have no idea what features it has. Going through the menus and clicking items randomly is how I learned most of the software that I’m using. One could RTFM before, but who wants to do that?
I see this as a menu search helper, but not as a menu replacement.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 4:14 AM EST reply Recommend (2) Flag actions
It doesn’t look like it’s going to replace appmenu entirely, at least not yet. I’m sure if it does, getting appmenu back will be as simple as:
sudo apt-get install appmenu
or maybe:
sudo apt-get install unity-appmenu
I don’t remember what the actual package name is, but I’m sure it’s easy to find with Google. :)
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 4:16 AM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
“There’s still a lot of design and code still to do. For a start, we haven’t addressed the secondary aspect of the menu, as a visible map of the functionality in an app. That discoverability is of course entirely absent from the HUD; the old menu is still there for now, but we’d like to replace it altogether not just supplement it.”
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/939
So.. they’re not dropping traditional menus right away. They realize they have some work to do on discoverability before this can happen.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 10:26 AM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
No one wants this, Shuttleworth.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 6:41 AM EST reply Recommend (4) Flag actions
use Mint then duh!
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 12:38 PM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
I used this feature yesterday for a while. I won’t use it very often since I don’t really use menus that much.
I think users of office software, GIMP. Inkscape mightfind it useful since finding menu items is faster this way.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 9:20 AM EST via mobile reply Recommend Flag actions
Looks alright, but they’d better not get rid of menus too. Sometimes you just want to see what menu options there are… Or you know where something is, but not what it’s called.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 9:21 AM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
Annnnnd what happens when you forget what the name of that random effect is?
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 9:42 AM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
why would i want to keep switching between keyboard & mouse more than necessary? If i’m editing a photo using the mouse why would i want to stop clicking around, switch to the keyboard, type, select, & then switch back to the mouse? It’s unnecessary & i’m tired of every facet of the linux world forcing these ridiculous unintuitive changes on everyone just for the sake of being ‘different’ or ‘new & exciting’. Kde ruined itself with 4.0, gnome with 3.0, ubuntu with unity & now this crap. I applaud them for trying to come up with new paradigms, but forcing it upstream is not the way to go, keep it forked until it’s truly ready for prime-time. Seriously, when you’re getting this much flak over something, to the point of further dividing an already divided user-base, why push ahead? What’s to be gained from that?
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 11:59 AM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
Awesome & thanks for all the Ubuntu updates! B-)
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 12:37 PM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
That emoticon is positively evil looking.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 1:03 PM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
please keep your crazy talk to yourself thanks.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 6:38 PM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
here i thought ubuntu was supposed to be the “easy to use” linux for the masses. it’s junk like unity that drove me away and things like this that make it impossible for the masses to adopt. good luck to those who stick with it, but i dropped ubuntu with 11.10 and from the looks of things i won’t be going back.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 12:39 PM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
odd.. its ideas like this that make me think… “maybe i should load up ubuntu again” I think everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but some here try to force theirs down every ones throat.
Posted on Jan 25, 2012 | 3:34 PM EST reply Recommend Flag actions
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