Heh as with most announcments where ubuntu makes changes to the UI the tech community is pretty dismissive, I for one love the fact that canonical are pushing forward a linux desktop experience in a way nobobdy else is, I didnt like unity much, but I trust these guys to fix it.
I find well done command interfaces much better than traditional menus for quite a lot of reasons
* they scale better, 10 items is a similiar experience to 100
* they are more discoverable, just start typing a word and go through the list of match (where help can be included)
* they can show information, each command can have a descriptive sentence (and a link to help), icons in a menu sometimes get tiny alt text
* they can adapt to your behaviour, if I use firefox all the time, pressing f in alfred give me firefox
they are more discoverable, just start typing a word and go through the list of match
I don't think that's discoverable. That is searchable: they do make it easier to search for a command you require without having to know under which menu to find it.
But they seem to be less discoverable in the sense that you cannot just browse through the menus to discover features. Having said that, there are probably ways to provide the discoverability of current menus, e.g., just list all the main menu items under each other, then typing a main menu item will show its items...
Still, discovering new features is not something you do nearly as often as using features you are familiar with, so the trade off seems to be a good one.
If the commands correspond to some set of objects (reserved words, defined functions, builtins, on-disk executables), then discoverability is indeed high.
Conventions also matter. Most Linux and GNU utilities offer:
- manpages (or, deprecated, info pages)
- a brief help with some variant of "-h|-?|--help"
- package information under /usr/share/doc/, generally with a pointer to upstream.
They'll often include readline command editing, command completion, and other features, all very useful.
Systems such as Debian's 'dwww' (built in web-enabled documentation integration) allow accessing all of this and more through your browser, if you prefer.
Not all utilities offer this. I've seen more than my share of proprietary CLI tools with very, very poor documentation and discoverability, so this isn't something that's inherent to CLIs. But it's certainly doable.
I see some 3200+ commands available on my search path, plus shell builtins and functions. My shell history includes fewer than 200 ($HISTSIZE=3000).
The situation for GUIs is very nearly always worse. Except for minimal interfaces, it's difficult to present more than a dozen or so options at a time. Some level of predictive completion may help, but in doing so you're starting to bridge the divide between a pure menu and a CLI.
I've found myself preferring CLIs increasingly, even in nominally GUI tools. The vimperator plugin for firefox claws back crucially useful vertical real-estate while offering a very powerful interface to my browser.
Perhaps I'm misreading you, but what's wrong with "bridging the divide between menus and CLI's"?
That kind of thing sounds like an excellent fit, especially for the programs shown in the accompanying video. Some things just work better with a visual interface - web browsing, graphics work, etc - so the ability to get away from the graphical sparseness of a CLI implementation while keeping its speed and expressiveness sounds like an excellent compromise to me.
The HUD proposal of Shuttleworth, on reading, is actually somewhat similar to how vimperator presently works. I can activate the statusbar with a ':' (same as in vi), and either hit tab or start typing. Though I don't get teh shinay overlay transparent displays, I'll get a list of completions for commands, URLs, bookmarks, etc.
Which is great when you're in front of a keyboard. When I'm using my phone (Android), I'm often annoyed at how niggly the interface is, and how much typing I have to do, in an environment which really does NOT support it well.
There are also users who simply learn things by rote. They don't know the commands, they don't understand the process, they simply click on a known element or (rarely) type something -- rarely more than their username or password. "My mom" or "Aunt Tilly" are the classic (if sexist) examples, but the former is certainly accurate in my case. She actively fears computers and loses about 50% of her confidence the second you park her in front of one.
As much as I think I'd like the HUD, I really do NOT think it would work for her.
Which is where Ubuntu is getting schizoid. For the past five years, it's seemed that the distro has been aiming for wider and broader appeal, with ease-of-use functions that appeal to the 99% (or more accurately, the 99.99%) -- the technologically naive (or illiterate, if you prefer). Which really pisses off this particular element of the 0.01% when I'm stuck on that interface.
It appears that the distro's taking a hard tack in the opposite direction now.
My own suggestion: do NOT aim for a one-size-fits-all interface. Simply ain't gonna work. Sure, all you Mac users will try to convince me otherwise, but aqua's an interface I find myself grossly stymied in.
Even if you know about a feature you use occasionally, you may not know that feature by name, so being able to drill-down to an obscure program or command by topic is important - especially when you have things like a scanner program name frickin' "Xine", etc.
And considering the announcement here is a road to create a searchable-not-discoverable interface on every individual gui, it seems quite like the project will be something of a train-wreck.
Further, there's no great contradiction between discoverable interfaces and searchable interface. The more "pedestrian" Windows 7 interface also allows one to discover easily as well as google-instant style search.
> there are probably ways to provide the discoverability of current menus, e.g., just list all the main menu items under each other, then typing a main menu item will show its items...
Tabbing to autocomplete anD double-tabbing to list all alternatives, just like a terminal?
I suspect those of us who use and swear by Gnome-Do/Synapse/Quicksilver and the like will love this. For those who don't, think of this is as 'Google Instant' applied to the desktop interface. It feels like a whole layer has been removed from between you and what you want to do.
It's so much more efficient and flow-of-thought oriented, and opens up new opportunities for innovation on the desktop (better fuzzy search algorithms, speech control, etc). Glad to see Canonical pushing the tech here.
I use Gnome-Do, Launchy, and Quicksilver on all of my machines, and I think this is a pretty horrible idea. The lack of similarity between program names is why the aforementioned programs are useful; the similarity between menu names are why this is questionable at best. I don't think "Close Project" and start typing it, I think "File menu" and scan for it, until I know the keyboard shortcut for it. Typing as much of "Close Project" is necessary to make it realize that that's what I mean, then arrowing (or whatever) to it, is slower than mousing to it. Once I know the keyboard shortcut for it, this "HUD" silliness is useless.
And if HUD ever gives me "Close Project" when I meant "Close Window", I'm going to throw it out the goddam window.
I like that they're trying new things, but "people like Quicksilver, so people will like something entirely unlike Quicksilver" is terrifyingly bad reasoning.
>Once I know the keyboard shortcut for it, this "HUD" silliness is useless.
Use the keyboard shortcuts when they're available or you know them, and HUD when they'er not?
>"people like Quicksilver, so people will like something entirely unlike Quicksilver" is terrifyingly bad reasoning.
If you think HUD is 'entirely unlike' Quicksilver, then you probably need to broaden your world somewhat. They're both just tools, and much more similar than not.
On this topic at least, my world is sufficiently broad, thank-you-very-much. I appreciate the condescension, though.
The search set of applications, which are generally fairly distinctly named (especially since the Linux world finally got away from G-everything and K-everything), and menu options, which generally are not because they operate on a small set of concepts, is so vastly different in requirements and behavior that it's like trying to jam a square peg in a round hole. So, yeah, it is (almost) entirely dissimilar.
Well, that's where 1) fuzzy search and 2) intelligent, usage-based sorting kick in. Not sure about other mentioned launchers, but Kupfer (which I use) indexes not only applications, but a myriad of other indexable items, such as files, media player items, window actions and so on, so we are talking about hundreds of items, some of which certainly similarly named. It would be completely unusable without great sorting and searching algorithm.
I find well done command interfaces much better than traditional menus for quite a lot of reasons
* they scale better, 10 items is a similiar experience to 100
* they are more discoverable, just start typing a word and go through the list of match (where help can be included)
* they can show information, each command can have a descriptive sentence (and a link to help), icons in a menu sometimes get tiny alt text
* they can adapt to your behaviour, if I use firefox all the time, pressing f in alfred give me firefox