I may have missed it, but have they actuelly had real users(i.e. not ui designers) do some usability testing (i.e. actual real work) on this? Coming up with it an pushing it into a public release in 4 months looks risky to me. Given how frustrated some users were with Unity, I really hope they learned the lesson.
This as presented this has a very high risk of turning into a "guess what the designers were thinking" game. While very flattering to the designer, it is frustrating as hell to the user. Arguably the current interfaces offer pretty much the same issue : a "guess in which menu I put the option" game - however there is one crucial difference : we got used to the current one, and actually have a really good idea how the designers were thinking - and where they put that option.
My main concern with this is discoverability - menus are helpful in that they convey a very precise listing of the app's possible actions (when designed well), something that's hard to otherwise come by.
Blender is perhaps the extreme example of this - it has an incredible amount of features, so they can't be placed into menus, and you spend some time learning where (in the hundreds of panels) or which of the thousands of keyboard shortcuts to use.
That said, I find keyboard-driven user interfaces very powerful, so I'm curious to try this out. Fortunately, there's been a way to turn off Crazy Ubuntu Features in most releases if you know how, at least so far.
> 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.
Blender actually has a HUD-like feature already. You can just hit space to bring up a searchable list of every command in the program. As a new user, I found it a lot easier to find things with the HUD than with the enormous menu and panel system.
Funnily enough, my experience was the opposite. I spent a while playing with Blender 2.49, and although its UI wasn't the most intuitive, at least I could use the menus to get a feel for what functionality was available. This new unified drop-down has the effect of grouping commands by textual similarity instead of conceptual similarity, which is much less useful. Even if you know what action you want to take, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do it unless you know exactly how Blender spells it.
Whenever I see anyone write, "say hello to the future of the ______", my immediate reaction is to assume the author is an idiot. The only person or company who has ever been able to say that with any authority is Apple, and that's only because they have a track record of consistently creating the future of ______ for decades.
Considering this HUD is basically "let's take Quicksilver and make it for menus", I think my immediate reaction was correct again. The idea isn't completely terrible, but it's not "the future" and it's riddled with problems. Hope you're the type who likes keeping cheat sheets around, because unless you know the exact name of every single command in your application, you're going to be in trouble.
"We’ll resurrect the (boring) old ways of displaying the menu in 12.04..." This guy's hubris is astounding.
If you want something similar in OS X right now (though not with super-fuzzy matching like this seems to have) you can just use the search box in the help menu to search for menu items.
qsb-mac, which I think is now dead, was great because it allowed you to access menu items for any app with minimal fuss.
Quicksilver also has a plugin called 'User interface+' that gives you the same option. Combined with proxies for current application, its a powerful tool.
Great alternatives to cmd+Shift+/ which can be really slow especially on browsers where menu items include history and bookmarks.
So basically... it's like the Windows 7 start menu search functionality, put into applications. It's not a terrible idea, but it should extend the current menu-based UI, not replace it.
Right. Or OS X's Help menu search functionality, or Quicksilver plus menus, or Alfred plus menus, etc etc etc. This has been the future for half a decade now.
I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 yesterday, and the experience sucked. It broke Firefox and Emacs, and it took me a lot of fiddling to get back to a desktop I can live with. Turns out, for instance, that you have to alt right click the bottom and top bars in Gnome classic, to modify them. Not exactly an easy thing to figure out if you've just been right clicking them for years.
Time for Ubuntu to stop dicking around with all the UI stuff and go back to making something that is solid. I really liked it when it first came out: it was a fairly dependable system that had regular updates, and was 'good enough' in the polish department. I could use it on desktops and servers alike and be pretty happy with it.
"Time for Ubuntu to stop dicking around with all the UI stuff and go back to making something that is solid."
Yeah, no kidding. Their problem isn't that they're just not X steps ahead of everyone else, it's that they aren't even close to the same level as OS X or Windows. They need to stop trying to be so clever and focus on the basics.
How do they get close if they don't try? Perhaps it's just the contrarian in me, but I'm glad to see some movement here. Admittedly, though, it does seem a bit "shoehorned" in, and not terribly discoverable, but I'll withhold judgment until I've tried it. I can't live without something QuickSilver-like at this point, so I should be well within their target audience.
Trying it is awesome, but only if it's an extra, not something that's happening in place, of, say, testing their distribution's upgrade process, testing it on disparate hardware, and other tedious things like that that make for a pleasant experience.
Entirely agree, people always defend Ubuntu's action by saying that they are after a different class of user (e.g the developers mum rather than the developer) and this is why they are changing the UI.
What they fail to realize is that even with the best UI in the world if 6 months down the line joe public clicks the "yes please upgrade me to the new ubuntu" button and then magically his wifi and sound break and his UI is replaced with something totally different that requires re-learning they are going to lose confidence pretty fast.
My wife, who is certainly smart and inquisitive, but not a 'power user', has been using Ubuntu just fine for several years with little intervention on my behalf, and she's going to have the same reaction I did when we upgrade her computer:
"Where the fuck did everything move to?!"
Which I guess is fine if you're willing to throw current users under the bus in the hopes of attracting lots of new users who will have never used the older versions.
(Admittedly, the neutrality of the experiment has already been somewhat compromised because she heard me swearing up and down about the upgrade last night)
I dunno. I run 10.10 at home and 11.10 at work (both relatively new machines). I really, really, really like hitting the super key and getting the dash, typing fire and hitting enter and opening firefox. In addition, you can hit super and a number and it opens the app in that number.
Maybe i just didnt love gnome2 enough. That being said, I really hate the way Unity appears to have broken the readline interface (for emacs shortcuts everywhere). Maybe I'm missing something, but I couldn't get that working in either 11.04 or .10.
I "sidegraded" to mint 11 right after the dubiously-named "upgrade" to 11.10 which broke the ubuntu 'classic' desktop. Mint had a normal interface and behaved as one would expect. Given how close the base was to ubuntu, the transition went smoothly. And I like green better than whatever undefined color ubuntu is anyway.
I recently upgraded to mint 12 and they are picking up a bit of the gnome3 suckiness - but it feels like they are really being unwillingly dragged into it and are fighting tooth an nail to keep it at bay. It is a bit worse than mint 11, but still a lot better than ubuntu 11.10. Maybe I should give that MATE thing a shot.
The only thing I kinda miss from ubuntu is the inplace upgrade process. Mint community seems to have some philosophical rejection of it and recommends a reinstall.
I am feeling that Ubuntu is pushing realy HARD to get into tablet space - throwing-users-under-the-bus-if-need-be kind of hard. I can see the advantage of a Unity interface there, but come on, i had to manually tweak the laptop with powertop to even get close to the battery life I was getting with windows. This will never work for an average-joe-grade tablet.
I know, I know It is free, if i dont like it, I can switch to something else. Guess what? I did. According to distrowatch i'm not the only one. It is a real pity to see a good distro go down like that.
> Mint community seems to have some philosophical rejection of it and recommends a reinstall.
I was doing in-place upgrades of Debian in the late 90ies, and they generally went quite smoothly. Not being able to to do that gives me a strong urge to use blunt terms like "horse shit". In-place upgrades are one of the reasons why you have an advanced package management system in the first place, and abandoning that is a huge step backwards. I do, after all, use this stuff on servers too.
Don't get me wrong. It is possible, the community website provides an accurate walkthrough[1] of how to do so and it looks totally scriptable. Mint just doesnt seem to have the "fire and forget" option ubuntu has. Their justification is that there is a risk of data loss/system corruption (see section E1 in link) :
> The only advantage Ubuntu offers is that it makes the process trivial and fully automated. Though, considering the risks and the way it upgrades your system, this should be considered dangerous.
I also sidegraded to mint 11 last year, and I tried upgrading to mint 12 but I didn't like the extra fluff they added, so I'm sticking with mint 11 for now. At some point I might just do a headless install of Ubuntu 11.10 and then install the LXDE and a few choice apps from there. We'll see, I'm open to trying something new, but I prefer minimalism.
might want to give Lubuntu a try(ubuntu with lxde instead of Gnome). I switched from ubuntu to lubuntu when Gnome 3 came out, and I've been very pleased.
Alt+Click is such a bad idea. How is a new user ever going to discover that? I am probably using Unity wrong (only occasionally on my old notebook), but I frequently am only able to do taks because I now they existed from previous versions. For example launch the upgrade manager.
Right. In Gnome 3, you don't even seem to get launchers that you can add where you want. You get some kind of activities thing. I want to press a button and get a new rxvt, not go play activities with the teletubbies.
Xfce looks like it may be an interesting alternative at this point. Gnome "fallback", or "classic" mostly does what I want, but with a name like that, it doesn't sound like something that will get much love/maintenance in the future.
Unfortunately, you (and I) are no longer GNOME's audience; We aren't who they're interested in targeting anymore. This would irk me less if GNOME 3 was a new/separate project instead of the future of GNOME 2, but c'est la vie. I've been trying to use XFCE instead, but in reality it falls short of GNOME 2 in so many ways it could never be a replacement.
Fortunately, some people have forked GNOME 2 and plan on continuing its development under the name MATE, and they have Ubuntu/Debian repositories up.
I started with Ubuntu in 2006 and I don't remember a time when they were ever "solid" or didn't break things up upgrades. Rule of thumb has always been to partition a separate /home and do a clean install every time. Maybe back when they were closer to Debian, but then that's just Debian's stability (not Ubuntu's).
I quite like this it reminds me of Firefox Ubiquity project. Which should act as a warning to Ubuntu as that never gained any real traction beyond power-users.
The fact that Mark mentions that they one day wish to replace menus is odd. Menus work and are universally understood. This system could be great in a complimentary fashion, the blender example seems like a great use of the system.
I really hope that Ubuntu don't throw the baby out with the bath water in their attempt to innovate.
Ubuntu's current (11.10 oneiric) menu cleverness breaks things for me using a non-standard window manager. (The gnome-terminal menu appears even when set to hidden.) Solution: purge every package with appmenu in the name and reboot. I hope it remains as easy to opt out from the next batch of little-tested, slightly buggy innovations.
It's Google vs Yahoo on the menubar! Currently we use the Yahoo method (hierarchical information based on someone else's curatorship), Mark is proposing the Google model (everything through a single search box).
Either one will not be as universally useful as combining them.
I'm still not sold, I found the UL-Corner positioning greatly aggressive. I'd put it in the bottom personally but I'm used to the Unix 'bottom command line' habit.
Otherwise it's one step closer to a contemporary desktop command line, in the video the guy even typed 'undo' in inkscape, made me smile. I guess having this common iterative search of nested menus will greatly help users, as it helped many of us in the shell or emacs (or any system providing this idea)
One quote from the article which I found interesting: “it works so well that the rare occasions when it can’t read my mind are annoying!”
I interpret that as, "While it's great being able to search for commands, it's an absolute pain in the ass to find the command if the search fails."
He mentions being able to look at the list of commands like a "table of contents" for an application, but I really don't see how that is possible considering what he has described.
All I know is that I'm going to be even more lost in GIMP with this update.
I have yet to find anything I like about Unity. As many of the other commenters have said, was there any real user testing on PCs the users actually own?
To this, this seems like a lot more unix-y way of doing things, and certain for someone like me who prefers to keep their hands on the keyboard, this is top-banana (yes, I know there's ctrl+alt+shift+X to doing something in one app or other, but remembering every combination in every application is a PITA).
If you've used Cloud9IDE's command line, I see this more like that -> you type git, and a popup shows you the completions for git.
There's a lot of haters, but I'm really keen on unity. It's like having gnome-do baked in. Sure, it's not quite polished, but at least it's trying different things than the identikit window managers out there.
> 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.
Basically - they're looking for some other interface to replace that aspect of the menu, but in the meanwhile the menu is still there for discoverability purposes.
It sometimes feels that Linux developers haven't ever seen a non-Linux user interact with a computer before. This seems doubly true for the folk who do UI/UX.
Judging by some of the changes they have made recently I don't think they have even seen a Linux user (outside of their own UI design team) interact with a computer before.
Hmm, I did not like the idea initially, but then I started thinking of how Emacs and (more importantly) Sublime Text work ... I must say, this very system works amazingly well for Sublime Text, why am I presuming that it is an automatic failure for menu bars?
Actually, I think that menu bars in general are a horrible crutch for pretty much every task. There is a reason why Windows introduced the "Ribbon". The Ribbon is Microsoft's way to get rid of the menu bar. Maybe Ribbons are not perfect, but they definitely improved discoverability of content.
ido-mode in Emacs introduces fuzzy matching for file navigation and it is awesome. CMD-T is a similar mechanism in Textmate. Sublime Text is pretty much built on the concept of fuzzy matched palettes.
All these are programs I very much like. Maybe Ubuntu is actually on to something there.
It reminded me of Sublime as well and I must say that the fuzzy match saves me a lot of time when switching between files. Having this functionality built into the OS could be very beneficial.
This doesn't seem like it would be very good for using with applications that you are familiar with. With context menus
you can remember the ALT + <key> combinations required to navigate to a feature quickly. With this you would have to type the name of the feature and then select it which might involve navigating a fair way down the list.
The only other option would be for all apps to assign keyboard shortcuts to everything
Also for applications that you are not familiar with you will have to guess what a particular feature is called and if it even exists in the first place. They would have to load all the apps up with synonyms and since Open Source developers can't agree on anything I'm not sure how many would even design their app around this.
Not to mention problems with users who have poor english or just poor spelling.
Having said all this, this feature is an excellent idea to supplement existing UI functionality. I've been integrating "feature search" type functions into some of my web apps for a while now and I'm surprised Apple and MS haven't done this more.
What a horrible idea. What happened to thinking about international users, for whom typing is a hassle? Learn from Japan, where Yahoo is more preferable over Google because you can find what you want rather than type it out...
201 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadThis as presented this has a very high risk of turning into a "guess what the designers were thinking" game. While very flattering to the designer, it is frustrating as hell to the user. Arguably the current interfaces offer pretty much the same issue : a "guess in which menu I put the option" game - however there is one crucial difference : we got used to the current one, and actually have a really good idea how the designers were thinking - and where they put that option.
EDIT : Right. I did miss that. Thanks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4
Blender is perhaps the extreme example of this - it has an incredible amount of features, so they can't be placed into menus, and you spend some time learning where (in the hundreds of panels) or which of the thousands of keyboard shortcuts to use.
That said, I find keyboard-driven user interfaces very powerful, so I'm curious to try this out. Fortunately, there's been a way to turn off Crazy Ubuntu Features in most releases if you know how, at least so far.
> 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.
Considering this HUD is basically "let's take Quicksilver and make it for menus", I think my immediate reaction was correct again. The idea isn't completely terrible, but it's not "the future" and it's riddled with problems. Hope you're the type who likes keeping cheat sheets around, because unless you know the exact name of every single command in your application, you're going to be in trouble.
"We’ll resurrect the (boring) old ways of displaying the menu in 12.04..." This guy's hubris is astounding.
It looks like this, and you can press return to activate the item: http://i.imgur.com/uJPgD.png
I've mapped Ctrl+M to move me there instantly with Keymando:
EDIT: Turns out there's already a shortcut for this: Ctrl-Shift-/. XCode overrides it though, so I'll be keeping my mapping.EDIT 2: Ah, yeah, it's Cmd, not Ctrl. I still like my two-key version though.
(? as in help)
Quicksilver also has a plugin called 'User interface+' that gives you the same option. Combined with proxies for current application, its a powerful tool.
Great alternatives to cmd+Shift+/ which can be really slow especially on browsers where menu items include history and bookmarks.
Time for Ubuntu to stop dicking around with all the UI stuff and go back to making something that is solid. I really liked it when it first came out: it was a fairly dependable system that had regular updates, and was 'good enough' in the polish department. I could use it on desktops and servers alike and be pretty happy with it.
Yeah, no kidding. Their problem isn't that they're just not X steps ahead of everyone else, it's that they aren't even close to the same level as OS X or Windows. They need to stop trying to be so clever and focus on the basics.
What they fail to realize is that even with the best UI in the world if 6 months down the line joe public clicks the "yes please upgrade me to the new ubuntu" button and then magically his wifi and sound break and his UI is replaced with something totally different that requires re-learning they are going to lose confidence pretty fast.
"Where the fuck did everything move to?!"
Which I guess is fine if you're willing to throw current users under the bus in the hopes of attracting lots of new users who will have never used the older versions.
(Admittedly, the neutrality of the experiment has already been somewhat compromised because she heard me swearing up and down about the upgrade last night)
Maybe i just didnt love gnome2 enough. That being said, I really hate the way Unity appears to have broken the readline interface (for emacs shortcuts everywhere). Maybe I'm missing something, but I couldn't get that working in either 11.04 or .10.
I recently upgraded to mint 12 and they are picking up a bit of the gnome3 suckiness - but it feels like they are really being unwillingly dragged into it and are fighting tooth an nail to keep it at bay. It is a bit worse than mint 11, but still a lot better than ubuntu 11.10. Maybe I should give that MATE thing a shot.
The only thing I kinda miss from ubuntu is the inplace upgrade process. Mint community seems to have some philosophical rejection of it and recommends a reinstall.
I am feeling that Ubuntu is pushing realy HARD to get into tablet space - throwing-users-under-the-bus-if-need-be kind of hard. I can see the advantage of a Unity interface there, but come on, i had to manually tweak the laptop with powertop to even get close to the battery life I was getting with windows. This will never work for an average-joe-grade tablet.
I know, I know It is free, if i dont like it, I can switch to something else. Guess what? I did. According to distrowatch i'm not the only one. It is a real pity to see a good distro go down like that.
I was kind of sad. In between the corrupted fonts and flickering windows it actually (no sarcasm) looked really really great.
I was doing in-place upgrades of Debian in the late 90ies, and they generally went quite smoothly. Not being able to to do that gives me a strong urge to use blunt terms like "horse shit". In-place upgrades are one of the reasons why you have an advanced package management system in the first place, and abandoning that is a huge step backwards. I do, after all, use this stuff on servers too.
> The only advantage Ubuntu offers is that it makes the process trivial and fully automated. Though, considering the risks and the way it upgrades your system, this should be considered dangerous.
[1]http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2
Xfce looks like it may be an interesting alternative at this point. Gnome "fallback", or "classic" mostly does what I want, but with a name like that, it doesn't sound like something that will get much love/maintenance in the future.
Fortunately, some people have forked GNOME 2 and plan on continuing its development under the name MATE, and they have Ubuntu/Debian repositories up.
https://github.com/Perberos/Mate-Desktop-Environment
I like gnome2 because I can customise the hell out of it and have things like separate task bars on each monitor.
I had assumed that they just dropped support for applets. Thankyou for telling me that.
How the hell is anyone going to just discover that?
The fact that Mark mentions that they one day wish to replace menus is odd. Menus work and are universally understood. This system could be great in a complimentary fashion, the blender example seems like a great use of the system.
I really hope that Ubuntu don't throw the baby out with the bath water in their attempt to innovate.
Either one will not be as universally useful as combining them.
http://www.webupd8.org/2012/01/hud-ubuntus-new-smart-menus-a...
I'm still not sold, I found the UL-Corner positioning greatly aggressive. I'd put it in the bottom personally but I'm used to the Unix 'bottom command line' habit.
Otherwise it's one step closer to a contemporary desktop command line, in the video the guy even typed 'undo' in inkscape, made me smile. I guess having this common iterative search of nested menus will greatly help users, as it helped many of us in the shell or emacs (or any system providing this idea)
I interpret that as, "While it's great being able to search for commands, it's an absolute pain in the ass to find the command if the search fails."
He mentions being able to look at the list of commands like a "table of contents" for an application, but I really don't see how that is possible considering what he has described.
All I know is that I'm going to be even more lost in GIMP with this update.
> 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.
Basically - they're looking for some other interface to replace that aspect of the menu, but in the meanwhile the menu is still there for discoverability purposes.
Actually, I think that menu bars in general are a horrible crutch for pretty much every task. There is a reason why Windows introduced the "Ribbon". The Ribbon is Microsoft's way to get rid of the menu bar. Maybe Ribbons are not perfect, but they definitely improved discoverability of content.
ido-mode in Emacs introduces fuzzy matching for file navigation and it is awesome. CMD-T is a similar mechanism in Textmate. Sublime Text is pretty much built on the concept of fuzzy matched palettes.
All these are programs I very much like. Maybe Ubuntu is actually on to something there.
The only other option would be for all apps to assign keyboard shortcuts to everything
Also for applications that you are not familiar with you will have to guess what a particular feature is called and if it even exists in the first place. They would have to load all the apps up with synonyms and since Open Source developers can't agree on anything I'm not sure how many would even design their app around this.
Not to mention problems with users who have poor english or just poor spelling.
Having said all this, this feature is an excellent idea to supplement existing UI functionality. I've been integrating "feature search" type functions into some of my web apps for a while now and I'm surprised Apple and MS haven't done this more.