Re: Heads Up Display

[Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com>]

On 03/09/2012 01:40 PM, Bhaavan Merchant wrote:
> Hello,

Hi, sorry for the delay in the answer.

> I am Bhaavan Merchant, and I have just joined this group. I have
> really liked the Gnome Shell UI and how gnome has become much more
> user friendly from Gnome3. Also, I have tried other environments like
> KDE and Unity but did not find them as convenient as Gnome.
>
> However, one feature in Unity 5.4 has impressed me. The HUD (Heads Up
> Display) ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_WW-DHqR3c ) which they
> have implemented, provides an easy accessible way to navigate through
> the menu system. The menu system, has been around since beginning of
> GUIs and hasnt really changed with times. IMO, it is archaic and also
> not consistent across different programs. IMO, HUD provides a good
> work around for this making menus usable again especially for programs
> like the Gimp, Inkscape, Blender etc. which have multi-level menu system.

There is something that I don't understand. Why do you think that HUD is
a accessibility improvement? In general GTK applications menu are right
now accessible. If you say that because you feel that with this
improvement Menus are more usable, IMHO, this is not an accessibility
improvement, but an usability improvement.


> Ofcourse we cannot remove the traditional menu system, since it is
> more or less a necessity in most applications. However, we could have
> HUD launch (perhaps on Alt keypress trigger), and make searching
> through menus an easier task.

This comments seems to justify my previous questions.

>
> I have prepared a mockup for this ( http://i.imgur.com/3rZm8.png ),
> and would really love to hear your feedback and suggestions on this.
> If the response is positive, I would love to work on this project, and
> begin implementing this on gnome perhaps by gnome 3.6. Excuse my gimp
> skills, because they are elementary.

Idem.

>
> Flow:
> 1) Normal Application is launched, and clicking its name on the top
> bar launches a traditional menu.
> 2) However when Alt is pressed, the traditional menu is replaced with
> an HUD menu instance, and the keyboard focus changes to the textbox in
> the HUD menu.
> 3) As one types, a fuzzy logic comparison is applied to match to the
> nearest available menu options and the result is populated in the menu.
>
> Thank you,

The main focus of the work that we are doing to improve GNOME Shell
accessibility is making the widgets,menus etc on GNOME Shell accessible,
so for example, an Orca user could use GNOME Shell as any other user.
But as I said, I feel that what you are proposing is about changing the
usability of GNOME Shell. In that case you should contact GNOME Shell
developers, or perhaps GNOME designers, as they are the ones that
decides usability issues there.

Thanks for your ideas and comments,

BR

-- 
Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias