The Latest Ubuntu Interface: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Menus!

Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth is getting a lot of notice for a blog post he has up, that defends the Heads-Up Display (HUD) interface that the upcoming version 12.04 LTS version of Ubuntu will feature. Shuttleworth's post characterizes the interface as a big new step for Ubuntu, and he offers a screenshot and a video illustrating it. Some users are guaranteed to balk at it, though, as it veers away from the menu-driven desktop computing interface that graphical operating systems have used for so many years.

According to Shuttleworth:

"It’s a way for you to express your intent and have the application respond appropriately. We think of it as 'beyond interface,' it’s the 'intenterface.' This concept of “intent-driven interface” has been a primary theme of our work in the Unity shell, with dash search as a first class experience pioneered in Unity."

Umm, I'm not completely sure I want an "intenterface." Shuttleworth also delves into criticisms of today's graphical interfaces:

"As a means of invoking commands, menus have some advantages. They are always in the same place (top of the window or screen)...They also have some disadvantages: when they get nested, navigating the tree can become fragile. They require you to read a lot when you probably already know what you want. They are more difficult to use from the keyboard than they should be, since they generally require you to remember something special (hotkeys) or use a very limited subset of the keyboard (arrow navigation). They force developers to make often arbitrary choices about the menu tree ('should Preferences be in Edit or in Tools or in Options?'), and then they force users to make equally arbitrary effort to memorise and navigate that tree."

The menu-driven desktop interfac has been dominant since the early GUI concepts that came from Xerox PARC many years ago. There are a lot of users who will balk at other concepts.

There are some really good ideas in Shuttleworth's post, though. For example, he confirms that Canonical is very focused on voice-, gesture- and touch-recognition. These, of course, are the same interface areas where Apple is making big inroads. They hold promise.

For those of us who use Ubuntu, though, let's hope that the HUD "intenterface" doesn't turn into another Unity-like brouhaha.