Ubuntu has announced a change to its version of Linux that ought to get hot-key junkies and voice-control enthusiasts alike to raise their heads with glee.
Seth RosenblattSeth peers into the deep, dark corners of software so that you dont have to, including browsers and security on Windows, Mac, and Android. He has yet to suffer a single nightmare about OS/2, although letskeyboards and mouses Heads up, Linux ns, Ubuntus ditching menus ce it: there are r scarier things out there besides long-dead operating systems. For instance, take the rumored Angry Birds/FarmVille crossover app...
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When youve been using it for a little while, it seems like its reading your mind, in a good way, he wrote.
If Ubuntu 12.04 remains on schedule, the HUD will land on April 26.
Shuttleworth cautioned that there was still work to do on the HUD. Things like the secondary aspects of menus, the lack of discoverability, and other patterns of interaction have yet to be mapped.
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His blog post is lengthy and worth reading for the way it details how the purpose of menus has driven their development. He also explains how he sees menus naturally transitioning to a VUI, even in traditional use cases like corporate environments. The VUI, he says, not only allows people to control their program by voice, but it also can learn repeated behaviors, thus a computer use more productive.
More than a streamlining of how the menu looks, though, Ubuntu 12.04 also will have extensive voice-command support. This Vocabulary User Intece, or VUI, will let you control Ubuntu by speaking to it. Shuttleworth explained that some of the benefits include fuzzy matching, in which imprecise commands are matched to user intent, and smart learning so the operating system can prioritize habitual behavior. It will also work with the system itself as well as the focused app. This means that the VUI is designed to let you go offline in Skype, or change your instant-message status through the HUD because, those apps all talk to the indicator system.
keyboards and mouses Heads up, Linux ns, Ubuntus ditching menus,Ubuntu 12.04 will introduce in April a new Heads-Up Displayfor interacting with the operating system, wrote Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. The HUD will allow you to express your intent with the operating system and the programs running on it, wrote Shuttleworth.
Some of the innovations Ubuntu has attempted have suffered setbacks, he acknowledged. The biggest one being that it hid the menu structure before the replacement was ready.
Currently, its activated by hitting the Alt key, which opens a translucent box into which you can speak or type your commands. As you start to type the workeyboards and mousesdFirefox, for example, the predictive menu will pull up launching Firefox as an option.
