The VAR Guy

Just when I thought Ubuntu developers were going to take a break from reinventing the user interface to focus on other pursuits, such as Ubuntu TV, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announced a new endeavor, the Head-Up Display, designed to replace window menus. Here’s a look at the plans and what they could mean for the Linux world.

As Shuttleworth — who formerly served as Canonical CEO until resigning that role in late-2009 to focus on the design and development of Ubuntu — noted on his blog, menus have been a central feature of pretty much every graphical user interface that’s existed since the 1970s. Declaring, “We can do much better,” Shuttleworth has boldly proposed a new interface concept, the Head-Up Display (or HUD for short), which theoretically could make interacting with the computer faster and more intuitive.

Specifically, the idea is to replace menus with pop-ups where users invoke a particular action simply by entering a few keystrokes or speaking a few words. Here’s a video of the concept in action:

Novel Idea?

I wouldn’t call the idea behind HUD totally new. In a lot of ways it’s comparable to Zeitgeist, which does for file system hierarchies what Shuttleworth wants to do for menu interfaces: help users find information without having to remember exactly where it’s (often arbitrarily) located. And there are plenty of tools already in existence — such as Synapse, the Unity dash and the GNOME Shell overlay — that build on Zeitgeist or similar technologies to provide functionality pretty similar to what Shuttleworth envisions.

What’s novel about HUD, of course, is that it would replace window menus entirely. That’s a wildly radical step, and one that represents a huge ambition for Shuttleworth and Canonical.

The incorporation of support for voice commands, which Shuttleworth emphasized as an eventual goal, also sets HUD apart from most existing tools that fall into the same category. It’s a great “natural next step,” as Shuttleworth put it, although given the relative paucity of solid voice-recognition technologies in the open source world, I’m a bit skeptical that this part of the HUD roadmap will be implemented very soon.

Thinking of the Users

Canonical touched off plenty of nerves about two years ago when it moved the window buttons in Ubuntu to the left by default. And the introduction of Unity engendered long and ongoing controversy. I’m therefore left wondering how users will react to this latest idea for radically revamping a central part of the Ubuntu interface.

Since Canonical — regardless of whether it deserved it — has already earned ill will among some users for earlier UI changes, it probably faces an uphill battle with HUD. People will be suspicious of the new tool before they even try it.

On the other hand, the fact that Canonical is pushing forward with this idea is an indicator that it’s not worried what dissenters think. It has prioritized innovation over keeping happy as many users as possible, a stance that could be interpreted as arrogance, but also could mean enough people are continuing to download Ubuntu so it doesn’t matter.

After all, Canonical is the only party with reliable means of determining just how many people continue to use Ubuntu despite all the loud controversy over Unity. Maybe it will turn out that those upset over the interface changes are just a vocal minority, and Ubuntu’s innovative interface features will become the envy of the Linux world.

Or maybe HUD will prove an ill-conceived idea and drive yet more users to alternative Linux distributions. Time — a lot of it, because as Shuttleworth admits most of the code for HUD hasn’t even been written yet — will tell.

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