I’d love to give it another shot one day though! It worked pretty well for me, but due to my lack of coding and subsequent dependence on Stardock (and therefore Windows), I walked away from it. I expanded on it and made some mockups using the power of Stardock customization apps. Of course, I didn’t come up with this design on my own I was inspired in part by a fictional interface from a 1990s anime. Two, you can have a very complex menu system that is still presented in a simple and familiar fashion across apps. There are two distinct advantages to the wheel concept: One, you don’t have to worry about where the menu is, as it is always where the cursor is. The next ring has less common commands, and the third ring would exist in complicated programs like photo editors and would invoke filters and such that are unique to that program. The innermost ring, closest to the cursor, contains the most used commands like save/open/print etc. I’d love to select some files and type ‘group in folder My files’ to create a new folder named ‘My files’ and move the selected items into it.įor discoverability, why not combine this with the right-click-wheel I had suggested many years ago when writing about OS interface paradigms? You right-click anywhere in an app (or on the desktop which is an app in some OSes) and you get a wheel with concentric rings. This way we see some related actions each time the HUD is used.Īnyway, I think this feature can attract both novice and power users. – Grouped actions: Instead of menu items, the HUD brings out buttons, like Microsoft ribbon pieces. – Help slideshow: illustrations showing the available actions. ![]() It’s an important drawback, but there is time to test a lot of solutions. ![]() If I write a single ‘x’, the system has to highlight the ‘cut’ option before any other options beginning with an ‘x’.ĭiscoverability remains a problem. Another thing this HUD needs to have is shortcut support. Imagine this menu powered by some kind of fuzzy search (think Wolfram Alpha, you can write anything but the machine understands you), and, suddenly, you can use this HUD in nearly any program, as long as you have a remote idea of what you want to do. ![]() I’m curious where they’re going to take this idea, but I’m happy they’re trying. They’re still working on the HUD, and Shuttleworth acknowledges the discoverability issue – they’re still working on a solution. Luckily for us, the HUD will supplement the traditional menu at first, but Shuttleworth does plan to abolish the menu altogether eventually In that sense, it’s the exact opposite of Microsoft’s ribbon. Only when you specifically know what command you want to invoke is the HUD useful otherwise, it offers no discoverability features. The big issue that I see, however, is that it doesn’t look like a replacement just yet. In all honesty, it’s actually quite brilliant, and I’d love to have it on my applications right now. As complicated as Shuttleworth’s long blog post makes it out to be, it’s just a search field which only searches within menu items of one application. They have downsides, too, though it’s hard to find something within menus and nested menus have a tendency to close accidentally. Menus are awesome in that they’re generally in the same place, there’s a fair level of consistency (even cross-platform), and, well, they’re familiar. Shuttleworth seems to believe it’s time to retire the concept entirely – or at least offer an alternative. Even in this supposedly post-PC world, the menu is still very much alive and kicking – they may have remarketed them as pop-overs or “touch selection experiences” or whatever, but don’t be fooled by that nonsense. ![]() The menu is a core element of the graphical user interface developed by Xerox, and it has been adopted by virtually all popular computing environments ever since. Shuttleworth has just announced yet another significant change for Ubuntu, and it’s all about replacing the menu with a search interface dubbed the HUD.īack when I still wrote my series on Common Usability Terms, I also wrote one about the menu. As much as I dislike Unity, I commend the Ubuntu team and Shuttleworth for having the guts to try to innovate and bring the desktop forward (pretty much the exact same can be said of KDE4 and GNOME3).
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