
Ubuntu rips up drop-down menus - elij
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/372385/ubuntu-rips-up-drop-down-menus
======
kijin
> The HUD will be introduced with the next version of Ubuntu, 12.04

> Shuttleworth: "It will be interesting to see how users react to the
> changes."

Please... this is an LTS release and your users aren't guinea pigs. I would
hate to see another potentially promising feature get bad-mouthed all over the
place due to premature release. Something like this needs months of usability
testing. Couldn't they just wait until 12.10?

~~~
gcb
That's one reason I'm back to Debian for a year now.

~~~
rlpb
The GNOME 3 shell is in the Ubuntu archive, same as Debian. AIUI, it's one
"apt-get install" away.

It seems a bit overkill to switch distro just because you don't like the
default.

~~~
jdbernard
But that's the whole reason I'm using Ubuntu in the first place: sensible
defaults. There are plenty of other great distros out there and switching is
easy, especially to such a close relative of Ubuntu like Debian.

------
MarkMc
Two things: 1\. OS X already does this in the 'Search' option of the Help
menu.

2\. Menus are a useful way to discover the main features of a program. That
is, the user can be in 'browsing' mode, not just 'searching' mode.

~~~
kiloaper
I haven't seen the OSX Help menu but I've seen this feature implemented in
several other program on Windows and Linux years ago. They don't seem to catch
on but I'm not sure why. Maybe it's habit or the fact search seems like more
effort or the need to know the exact name for something or that people prefer
the 'presence' that menus give to options. Personally I think it's great, as
long as there's an option to restore menus so you can 'browse' like you
suggest.

~~~
ugh
What’s great about OS X’s approach is that it’s always there, in every app.
(Some apps disable it which is a good way to make me angry.) Especially when
you open up a brand new app or one you are not using frequently it can be
frustrating to get your bearings. I can, for example, never remember where I
can lock or group objects (I’m not even sure whether those commands are
usually in a consistent place), the search is a good way to find out whether
that functionality is available and where I can find it, also for future
reference. Scanning menus for a specific command when I have no idea where it
is is very frustrating for me.

This wouldn’t really work if every app had to implement this feature on its
own, probably in different places and with slightly different behavior. Even
if the behavior were consistent you still could never be sure whether you can
search in the first place, that uncertainty is in my experience a good way to
make sure a feature will never get used.

This seems like a great OS level feature.

------
sp332
This is a great start, but I hope it goes so much further. I always liked the
(now defunct) Ubiquity project. Here's the first video they made, it's so
ambitious! <http://vimeo.com/1561578> You could bring up a browser command-
line and start typing the name of a command, say "map" to look something up on
Google Maps. As soon as you type 'm' it would give a list of autocomplete
options. The internationalized parser had a concept of subjects, verbs, and
objects, and could autocomplete or even guess some of them.

But the coolest part was how you could add functionality. The framework let
you write new commands that interacted well with the parser and gave hints to
the autocomplete, and even custom UI with HTML & JS. And then users could
_subscribe_ to your commands. Ubiquity would cache the code and periodically,
seamlessly upgrade your browser with new versions of the commands you
subscribed to.

I was very sad when they discontinued development, and Unity looks like an
excellent place to put these ideas to work again.

~~~
william42
Actually, my first thought was "This reminds me of Enso", Enso being the
predecessor to Ubiquity(by the same people before they were hired by Mozilla),
but integrated into the desktop as a whole rather than the browser.

Unfortunately, my main complaint with Enso and Ubiquity was that both were
unfortunately rather buggy. And given Ubuntu's track record with Unity, I
suspect that it will be just as buggy.

------
crazygringo
This completely violates one of the most important aspects of interface
design:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance>

The article says: "One of the first things people do [when they get a new
piece of software] is go through all the menus".

Of course we do! That's how we learn what the program _can_ do, not just _how_
to do it. That's affordance.

~~~
jessriedel
After reading the brief history of this word, I think "discoverability" is a
more recognized and less ambiguous term (albeit not as elegant).

Also, I think if the HUD is added to, rather than replaces, the menus, then
the HUD has the potential to significantly increase discoverability.

~~~
repsilat
The entries in the HUD are definitely hierarchical, so I don't see a good
reason why there can't be a way to browse through them "the old fashioned
way". I wonder if the autocomplete suggests submenus, or just terminal
entries?

I also hope this provides a nice, general way to introduce sciptability into
applications, and that actions will be able to take arguments in the future.
Or is that going too far?

------
kstenerud
So without a browsable menu, how do I discover what features a program has?
Normally that's done by browsing through the menus.

~~~
shantanubala
I'm hoping by final release that the HUD will include a drill-down menu (like
the iPod) or something similar if the search box is blank.

~~~
WayneDB
Drilling down to see leaves and then drilling back up to the root to see the
next branch sounds tedious...unless I can do it the same exact way that it can
be done now with a mouse and a normal menu (i.e. without clicking, just
hovering).

However, "hover" isn't a touch thing, so I bet that Ubuntu will make that
functionality a 2nd class citizen or just cut it out altogether in favor of
more a more tedious "touch oriented" (read: clicky) drill-down behavior. Which
will suck (IMO).

~~~
shantanubala
Aren't drop-down menus technically the same as "drill-down" in terms of number
of clicks? As long as you can use "breadcrumbs" that allow you to quickly
access the hierarchy of menu items, it shouldn't require any additional clicks
to get to the option you want.

~~~
WayneDB
Yes, drop-down menus are a drill-down system, but after the first click, you
can see each subsequent menu's drop-down by simply hovering.

In a touch-oriented drill-down scenario, there's no concept of a hover, so you
have to touch once to see every level of the menu.

------
pnathan
As an emacs user with experience with a keyboard based 'hud' system, might I
recommend an 'apropos' system for discoverability. =)

~~~
qdog
Yes, sounds like a re-invention of the shell. No problem with that, but it
doesn't really sound all that new, imho.

I mash the tab key in bash all the time for completion when looking for a
command, perhaps not as advanced as the 'fuzzing', but handy nonetheless.

------
jmilloy
Menus, shortcuts, and command search each have their place.

One of the goals should be reducing the frequency of keyboard <-> mouse
switches. If I'm using Paint, it would be annoying to type to search for
commands; it would be the only time I had to let go of the mouse. It works the
other way, too, and such "keyboard-centric" applications will benefit from a
fast and easy command search.

And no matter what, as many commands as possible should have a keyboard
shortcut, which should be listed next to the command when you search for it
(this doesn't look to be the case). When we already know which command we
want, we don't need to search for it.

I understand the need to force a shift to new/better features, but that
doesn't mean removing features for existing and continuing use cases.

~~~
kijin
An interesting thing is that Unity is also trying to be a tablet-friendly
interface. Using the keyboard on a tablet is rather cumbersome. HUD looks like
a partly desktop-optimized, partly tablet-optimized interface that sits
awkwardly in-between.

I'm curious why Canonical thinks it's a good idea to train users to rely on
the keyboard to find things. (Ever tried to find a program in Dash?) Despite
the rise of the "search" paradigm, keyboard shortcuts, and typing in general,
have always been the domain of experienced users and programmers. Ordinary
users tend to rely much more on the mouse; they type only when absolutely
necessary. In fact, unless the new interface gives them plenty of hints,
they'll probably no idea what to type. Wasn't Ubuntu trying to make things
easier for ordinary users, even at the expense of power users? Or does the
benefit outweigh the potential disadvantages in this case?

~~~
srik
They plan to make the HUD capable of gesture and speech recognition.

~~~
kijin
People still need to figure out what to say, or what gesture to make. Without
a traditional menu or toolbar to advertise what functionalities are available,
how would they do this? A video tutorial?

------
keithpeter
"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."

Do I detect a touch of Jef Raskin's idea of typeable commands here as well?
I'll have to re-vist his _The Humane Interface_

Bring it on I say

~~~
sp332
Yup, immediately reminded me of Jef's son Aza's work on the Enso and Ubiquity
projects.

~~~
keithpeter
Appears to work well. I think it might be adaptive to some extent in the same
way that the Dash is for program names. For instance, typing 'new window' at
first produced a list of odd commands, but then after several invocations, the
File -> New Window option was listed first.

Trivial example obviously. The activation key is 'alt' at present and appears
to be hard wired.

------
zerostar07
I got news for you ubuntu, CLIs have been doing that since ever. I wonder how
people decide to do things like these: the purpose of a GUI is to do the work
faster. Did anyone ever try to measure how much longer it takes to perform
something by typing it instead of searching through menus? CLIs make sense
when you have thousands of commands available, but a typical application has
less than 50 commands available and it makes perfect sense to have them in
menus (BTW it's the same reason why restaurants have menus and google
doesn't).

How about an alternative: Leave the menus as is, and introduce a global
keyboard shortcut that searches menus, a per-application Alt-F2

~~~
resnamen
Wouldn't happen. Abandoning user choice and configurability seems to be in
vogue with designers these days. We're just slouching our way toward our
future as passive appliance users.

(I totally agree - either turn it into a keyboard shortcut, or a reserved
16x16px spyglass icon in the upper right hand corner of the menu bar...)

------
mosjeff
I haven't tried this myself but it definitely sounds like a great idea. Very
similar to the purposes of Quicksilver, Alfred, or Launchy. Only instead of
searching for applications, you're searching for functions _within_ an
application.

------
Lighting
Yerk. I hate these things instead of the drop down menu because

a) often the way I discover about the other programs/things that are similar
is the fact that they also appear in the same drop down menu.

b) memory. Often the name of the item is not something I recall, but I
remember the shape/color of the icon, or the association with the location in
the menu

c) namefail. These things (at least how it works in Ubuntu 11) suck at finding
the actual program. Some programs have multiple names by which they are known
and they don't show up when you type the more common one. Google Earth is a
good example. Or some - just don't show up at all for some reason.

------
jiggy2011
Allowing searching of context menus is a great idea, hopefully this extends to
all parts of the UI and will work with Java applications as well (I'm always
getting lost in the eclipse settings menus).

Removing context menus altogether though? Navigating around the application
using ALT + <Key> is much quicker than bringing up a search and typing a full
word in and then navigating to the second or third option down.

The only other alternative would be to add keyboard shortcuts to absolutely
every feature in every application.

------
gurkendoktor
This sounds a lot like the 'Help' menu in OS X 10.5+, one of the best
"details" of Mac OS ever. I apply radial blurs in Photoshop exactly that way.
Click 'Help', type "radi", enter.

Also great to find your way around after an upgrade to Xcode 4. I even used it
in TextMate until I found out about cmd+ctrl+T. Only Eclipse had (has?) broke
it, of course...

It doesn't learn, though.

------
v33ra
//"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."//

One of the reason why I loved Launchy[1] so much. That little program
drastically reduced the need to use the mouse and launch/find any application
with just a few keystrokes.

Even, Ubuntu 11 has similar functionality with Unity. But,it's searching
capability is little disappointing, though.

[1] - <http://www.launchy.net/>

------
soosh
Random question -- does any operating system or application, having noticed
you did something the hard way, say, "hey, next time, hit Ctrl-% when you want
to do that?"

~~~
marchdown
Both Windows and OS X have conventions in place to help with discoverability.

Windows menus items have certain letters underlined, and you can hit
Alt+underlined letter to open a menu, then Alt+letter to select an item or
submenu. It provides both discoverability and keyboard-based navigation.

OS X places hotkeys at the far right of every menu item which has a hotkey
equivalent.

~~~
soosh
sure, discoverability. I guess what I want as a user is for Excel to tell me,
"you're formatting a lot of cells the same, have you heard about format
painter?" ... though as Clippy that was a little obnoxious.

~~~
marchdown
That would be great. Do you know any other apps (other than emacs, that is)
that provide a similar sort of discoverability? And on the similar note, is
there a way to make emacs's tips be even _more_ prominent?

------
dmbass
I always wished the kind of mouse+command line interface found in AutoCAD
existed for more applications. This seems like an nice step in that direction.

------
robgibbons
This looks like a cool idea, but a search-centric menu system doesn't allow
for "discovery" of the item you might be looking for. Sometimes at the end of
a long day I might be burnt out and not have in my head exactly what the item
I need is called, but my fingers remember how to get to it. This system kind
of makes that scenario a bit more difficult.

------
JGailor
I'm not in love with the design, or how big and out of place it feels just
appearing in the top left corner, but it's a great start and I hope they keep
pushing it forward.

I hope developers of Alfred for OS X look at this and try to apply some of
those ideas going forward. App-specific, contextual Alfred would be great.

------
dibs
I like the idea of an intelligent command line interface. Hopefully it is
intuitive enough as well.

------
gravitronic
Assuming this is what is in the latest Ubuntu 11 The thing I found the worst
about this interface was how slow it was in operation.

I don't know if it's iterating a directory of softlinks or an SQLite database
but it was slowww on two computers I use that run Windows 7 well.

And before in case you question my love of Linux.. my solution was to boot
into Fluxbox.

~~~
jsight
This feature will be new for Ubuntu 12.04 (it is not in 11.10).

~~~
gravitronic
It's not the same as their unity dock? oh.

------
sandGorgon
At the same time, Cinnamon 1.2 was
released([http://www.webupd8.org/2012/01/cinnamon-12-released-with-
des...](http://www.webupd8.org/2012/01/cinnamon-12-released-with-
desktop.html)) which is a Gnome Shell fork with Gnome 2 usability, by the
makers of Linux Mint.

------
vvpan
Blender has been doing this for a while. Works pretty well.

------
laconian
Sayonara, muscle memory!

------
gcb
...and we are back to the command line paradigm

Perfect for the expert, no exploration for the newcomer

------
hendrix
Ubuntu 10.04LTS has gnome 2, it also had gnome-do which was awesome. Ubuntu
12.04 is going to have unity/blurify or whatever -- this is a gigantic change
and what prompted me to switch back to windows 7 on my laptop. This is too
much change too fast especially when Ubuntu is targeting people from windows
that are accustomed to windows xp/7.

TL;DR Ubuntu is moving wayyyy too fast.

~~~
barnaby
I would argue it's not moving fast enough. We are in the middle of a very
fast-paced transition in human-computer interaction. New form-factors like
tablets are being adopted rapidly (nearly doubling over this holiday season
alone). A speech-enabled HUD could become the killer app of hand-held devices.
But it's still not on the market, and Canonical still do not have a way to
install Ubuntu on tablets. E.g. They have to move even faster!

If you think that the pace of technological change is too fast, or if you
think that the music is too loud and those young hooligans should get off your
lawn... then please stay on XP; but don't hold back the rest o us who will
move forward without you. I look forward to your similar rant against Windows
8 with it's hand-held interface design.

~~~
hendrix
OK, I think I might have worded things a bit awkward there. Actually I agree
with you completely in that technology is not moving fast enough. Having a
speech enabled android tablet/phone could actually compete with siri and would
be very, very cool.

The point that I disagree on is that Mark Shuttleworth & CO are releasing
software every 6 months that in many cases (myself included) breaks
comparability with hardware. This among other problems has IMO caused Ubuntu
to fall to #2 on distrowatch, while Linux Mint which includes MATE and a much
more customizable gnome 3 has risen to the top _. If they can really make it
against apple then more power to ‘em.

_ (yes I know Ubuntu does not include gnome 3 by default but both gnome 3 and
unity depart from the traditional win95 style desktop)

