Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) with 'HUD' Interface

     What in the world is HUD, you ask? Well for those who missed it, it's Head-Up Display, a new interface planned for Ubuntu 12.04 "Precise Pangolin" that will eventually replace menus in Unity applications and recognize voice commands.


     Called “HUD,” or “Head-Up Display,” the new interface is designed to recognize users' intent in interacting with the desktop rather than forcing them to navigate a rigid menu system to get things done.


     Menus serve two purposes . They act as a standard way to invoke commands which are too infrequently used to warrant a dedicated piece of UI real-estate, like a toolbar button, and they serve as a map of the app’s functionality, almost like a table of contents that one can scan to get a feel for what the app does.




The video below demonstrates HUD in action

Predict what I want


     It always scares me when people tell me the system will predict what I want, because so far computers have tended to do a very bad job of predicting my desires.Regarding HUD's planned voice recognition, "Are they serious? How well my PC works is gonna depend on whether I have a cold?" tech blogger hairyfeet added. "I've tried both Win 7 voice recognition and Dragon Speak, and frankly neither of them do very well, even after millions spent on R&D; Canonical thinks they can just throw something together and it'll work better than those two?"


     Focusing instead on users' intentions, the new interface--now in prototype form--will match what the user types in a search box with a list of commands for potential invocation.
HUD will include not just the focused app, since that's most likely to be where the user will want to invoke some action, but also system functionality, he noted, even allowing users to go offline on Skype


Things Have to Be in Their Places


     Some things were just not meant to be searched for, and they are our tools.It would be crazy if we woke up every morning and had to relearn where our hands and feet were. "Streamline and prioritize menus -- don't eliminate them. Standardize the user interfaces of applications -- don't mix them all together. For speed and efficiency, things have to be in their places." Blogger Pogson explained.


     A lot of these ideas are very untested in terms of overall usability, and they represent a sort of 'back to the future' approach, thinking of the old X applications before menus became prevalent where you'd have a command window and a display window.
"Integrating voice commands is hard enough with a pure command approach because computers do not process sound or language the way we do," blogger ChrisTravers pointed out.


     My guess here,though i am not a frequent user of Ubuntu,got inspired from one of my friends and using it for some specific applications is that Ubuntu, in moving more to what amounts to a research project, will produce some interesting interfaces and things that we will all learn from, both in terms of what to do and what not to.
If the HUD lands in 12.04 LTS, we hope we'll find ourselves using the menu less and less, and be glad to have it hidden when we are not using it.we 'll wait till April and watch what Ubuntu has to offer.