If you want to get a good idea about the Unity Heads-Up-Display, Jo-Erlend Schinstad has a good description of why he thinks It’s A Great Idea. It is also interesting that the first comment completely ignores his initial point about the media representation of the innovation and instead reinforces it.
Up until now, there’s been three omnipresent ways of performing an action; menus, toolbar buttons and keyboard shortcuts. Recently we’ve also gotten gestures, but I’ll overlook them in this context. In a computer program, they are just different representations of the same thing. There’s limited space on the screen, so you can’t have too many buttons. Menus are more efficient, but still wastes a lot of space. Moreover, they’re usually filled with items you never use. They’re there to serve other users needs, or even just as fill-up or decoration! Many applications actually have a menubar for the sole purpose of looking more similar to other applications. They’ll have a menu structure like File > Exit and Help > About and nothing more.
The point is that this Shuttleworth Ubuntu effort is towards having the computer learn what you want and how you do things rather than forcing you to learn how the computer does things.
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