--- In sqa_bangladesh@yahoogroups.com, "Mukit, Ataul" <epolymer@...> wrote:
>
> I don't know whether it's a new concept, but it looks interesting:
> Say hello to the Head-Up Display, or HUD, which will ultimately replace menus in Unity applications. Here's what we hope you'll see in 12.04 when you invoke the HUD from any standard Ubuntu app that supports the global menu:
>
>
> Snapshot of the HUD in Ubuntu 12.04
>
>
> Read more on:
> http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/939
>
Its not a new concept, Mac does it via the help menu since Leopard (I think). Command+? gives you quick access to the menu bar and you can type in anything that relates to the menus of the current application in focus and it will actually show you what you're doing by pulling down the appropriate menu and marking the action. Also, there is quicksilver for mac which is the best application launcher I have seen so far on any platform and you can do similar things using quicksilver as well using plugins. The HUD UI is just a fancier version of this in my opinion but still a bit messy once you drill down to 2/3 levels of nested menu items. You'll see references to OSX doing the same for years in different comments in the blog post.
In general, HUD will be great for Linux since there was nothing like this (as far as I know) in Linux and most of the quicksilver clones for Linux weren't as good. But they are definitely going towards the right direction by integrating this feature into the desktop manager itself rather than separate applications like Enso. I have seen Enso before but never personally tried it so I could be wrong about how they work but it looks like it comes with a pre-defined set of actions for popular applications and might not work with *any* application in general. But like I said, I could be wrong about Enso.
Slightly off-topic, in my opinion, Ubuntu developers need to spend more time on polishing these fancy features before releasing them. Unity is a great example for this, it removed the need to use stat menu like systems with a search bar but it doesn't do enough fuzzy searches to figure out what you want to run. I had some negative experience with Unity a couple of days ago when I upgraded to 11.10 when Unity wouldn't even find "gnome-terminal" or "terminal" after a fresh install with all updates.
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Tareq
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