Mark Shuttleworth have just announced their next big plan. Replacing the “boring” menus with the new Heads Up Display. It a new feature coming in the next Ubuntu 12.04. Earlier, you navigated through your menu with your mouse. But now, you use your keyboard. Simply press the Alt key to activate the hud and tell it what you need.
It’s a way for you to express your intent and have the application respond appropriately. We think of it as “beyond interface”, it’s the “intenterface”.
Rather than searching for what you want, you simply tell it what you want and the Hud will do the searching for you. Several times I felt the need of a program to search through menus. Some times, it takes a lot of time to find the right task for you. So, I think this will be a really great start.
The Hud is smart. It learns while you work and prioritize tasks according to your needs. Imagine, that the menu have an item called “Preferences”. But, we search for settings… According to Mark, Hud will be smart enough to recognize this and give the right result for us.
We can search through everything we know about the menu, including descriptive help text, so pretty soon you will be able to find a menu entry using only vaguely related text (imagine finding an entry called Preferences when you search for “settings”).
Another great feature in Hud is voice commands. You don’t have to type if you don’t like. You can speak the commands just like we use Siri in the iPhone.
In Ubuntu 12.04, you might get the old menus with Hud. But, their plan is to remove the menu and replace it with the Hud. Actually, Ubuntu is going in a completely different path. They don’t want to follow others and stick to the tradition. They need a change. They needs to innovate. If we take several Linux systems, they’ll look the same with only a small amount of differences. But, Ubuntu wants to be completely different. I like that. But, still I don’t like Unity! So, what do you think?
- Source : Markshuttleworth.com
