HUD: Unity’s awesome bar!

Linux / By / / 2 minutes of reading
HUD or Heads UP Display is an intelligent search bar in Ubuntu, unveiled by Mark Shuttleworth today, which promises to search anything under the sun! Well, sort of!! Actually, HUD is the new search bar which will enhance finding of menu and submenu items . It will replace the existing global menu and integrate into the search bar of Unity.

This is the HUD. 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. Now we are bringing the same vision to the application, in a way which is completely compatible with existing applications and menus.

Mark Shuttleworth
The project is still at a very nascent stage and is available for testing only. There will be a lot of addition/ removals of features, e.g. integration of voice navigation.

From the initial demos of the application I feel it will make it extremely difficult for novice users to find any menu items. And, it will also annoy users who does not like to use the keyboard to find stuff. 

Below is a video showing a working demo.



Installation

If you want to test HUD on your system, use the following repository. Please remember, it will replace your current unity search bar.


sudo add-apt-repository ppa:unity-team/hud

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade


Uninstall


If you do not like HUD, you can remove it by the following commands:



sudo apt-get install ppa-purge (if you dont have ppa-purge)

sudo ppa-purge ppa:unity-team/hud


Please share your thoughts on HUD!

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