Another Ubuntu Interface refinement

[zvi]

Heads Up Display will be coming to Precise Pangolin.

From what I can tell, it's similar to gnome-do or Quicksilver, but even more entangled with what we normally think of as menu functions.

Thoughts, reactions, screams of panic and horror? Either yours or that you care to link to in the comments?

Comments

[teapot_rabbit]

I'm still running Lucid Lynx (10.4, I guess?) on my main desktop, because of my hatred of Unity. The HUD just looks like more of a bad thing. I'll probably be upgrading my hardware and switching back to Windows in the next few months.
It will be awfully nice to say goodbye to the Gimp.

[blnchflr]

I'm still running Maverick for similar reasons: I haven't yet tried Unity, because of the bad things I've heard.

I'm not at the point of going back to Windows, though, *clutches edge of desk in horror at thought*, but it's possible I won't be staying with Ubuntu.

[zvi]

Unity was very rocky in its first release, but I think it cleaned up nicely (not to perfect, but nicely) in 11.10.

[dragonwolf]

I switched to (and fell in love with) Fedora before 11.10 came out, but I fired up 11.10 in a VM not long ago. It's still not my cup of tea (I can't stand the "universal menu" system, and the way the dock is handled; it's also been my experience that it's not large/multi screen friendly), but I think it is substantially better than 11.04.

[teapot_rabbit]

I'm running some version of Unity on my netbook, and while it is kind of nice for a smaller screen, there are just too many things about it that drive me crazy. I detest the pop-up menu thing in Mac, and I detest it in Unity, too. I like my taskbar!

Plus, it's been a couple years, and I'm starting to miss being able to buy software that actually works.

[allen]

I switched over to Kubuntu. KDE is not quite as stable as I'd like, and the focus-follows-mouse fails on some edge cases, but otherwise I've been happy with it.

[zvi]

1) You can us the GIMP with Windows.
2) There are other Linux distros out there. You might like Xubuntu or Kubuntu, or even a non-Ubuntu derivative.

[teapot_rabbit]

Yes, but I really, really don't like Gimp. Adobe CSwhatever is a major plus for Windows.
I have been thinking about testing out other Linux distros.

[zvi]

I misread what you originally wrote; I thought you were saying that you were going to miss GIMP. That was faulty reading on my part, what you wrote was perfectly clear.

[dragonwolf]

I can't argue Photoshop's current superiority to Gimp (at least when dealing with interoperability), but their attitude toward the Linux community (and their userbase as whole) has turned me off of Adobe entirely.

[ratcreature]

It looks interesting. I don't think I'd mind having the program search menus for me. It happens to me quite often that I can't recall where for example viewing the page source in FF is. I keep expecting to find it in view, when it's only in the right click. And viewing the page info is in extras. And Gimp is even worse. I always forget where certain things are, like certain transparency options and other stuff deeper in the menus, even if I use them really often. So if this works like intended I might like it.

[zvi]

I used gnome-do and a different gnomething similar to it before we got Unity (trying to invoke these alternate interfaces in Unity was kind of a pain, so I stopped) and I really liked it. Something even more context specific seems exciting to me.

[ratcreature]

I've not yet switched to unity, but this sounds like it has promise to me as innovation. Especially if it helped with the nested menus. I mean, for example in Gimp I often have my right hand with my tablet pen, and do the main tool switches on the keyboard with my left. If I could go into the menus with the keyboard without having to memorize shortcuts, that could be really nice.

[asenathwaite]

Intenterface? Really?

[zvi]

He's a millionaire, not a marketer, despite what he may think.

[facetofcathy]

Wow, I really like it--can't wait.

But then I took to Unity right off. I wasn't expecting to, and I have some quibbles with it, but I really like the fuzzy logic keyword search in Unity. That's essentially what this is, and I find the speed of Unity at showing me what I want really useful.

Really hoping that Geany integrates this, and it will make Gimp a whole lot more useful for a casual user like me.

[zvi]

If I understand this correctly (and it's possible I really don't) but HUD should work with any app that creates its menus in the standard gnome way, so Geany definitely. I'm not sure about QT apps.

[facetofcathy]

Hope this is the case. Geany has a lot of nested menus and it would be nice to get to the things I use quickly.

[zvi]

Out of curiousity, have you ever used bluefish? How does it compare to Geany?

[facetofcathy]

I have not tried that. I checked out the features page, and a lot of it is for stuff I don't currently need, but one thing stood out and that was spell check for the non-code part of documents.

I also like the idea of project-specific settings and it supports mediawiki, which would be interesting to have a look at.

I might give that a try.

[dragonwolf]

According to the comments, it should work with any of the standard UI libraries, including QT and GTK.

[bookherd]

As a heavy netbook user, I really like the emphasis on maximizing usable screen space. (Now if only Google wasn't moving in the opposite direction...)

However, there are times I don't know the name of the function I want, but I know what category of functions it belongs with. For those times, and for the times I just want to explore the program's command options, I'll still want the old-style menus. As long as those are still available to "switch on" when I need them, I'm content... and it sounds like they will be.

[vlion]

As an emacs user, typing commands into my program is quite normal, thank you very much. ;-)

Ahh - in general I think Unity is a shuddering unconfigurable horror, and I install something different whenever I have an Ubuntu system.