Heads-up Ubuntu fans

It can go when something better replaces it. Typing and searching is not better than a single click.

Apparently you are all wrong

Quoting:Apparently you are all wrong ...

@TC,

And you are very right, there is no single best tool. :-) Best is having them all available. including voice activated commands, for users to select what is best at the time.

Besides, as long as Disney has lobbyists the mouse is immortal.

I, for one, would be delighted to get rid of the mouse entirely. Unfortunately it's not possible to do it unless you're willing to die a death of thousand rodent bites due to assumptions made bu GUI designers all over the place. And I mean applications, not desktop environments.

I see the mouse and keyboard as the only interface duo until speech or neural commands can be perfected.

We recently set up a quadriplegic child with a Dell dual core laptop to drive chair functions and I found her a great mic with external noise dampening for voice commands. The software unfortunately is Windows only but it is being developed here in Austin at the University of Texas and it did not cost anything for us...we were able to get it donated as part of their study.

I had not played with voice recognition software for a few years and this particular project reminded me why. The time it takes to "train" the software to your voice, even for the simplest of commands is great. When you compound that with complex commands and vocal influx, then it more than triples the time to get the program up and running.

Dragon software has been at this for over a decade and there is still way more bugs than features in it. Until we can get voice recognition software to work for us, the mouse and keyboard will be the hindering factor in computer interaction. Of course it would be nice if we could have an Open Source version to compete with Dragon but this is another area where there just isn't either the interest, talent, time or money to develop it.

Quoting:Of course it would be nice if we could have an Open Source version to compete with Dragon but this is another area where there just isn't either the interest, talent, time or money to develop it.

I don't know much about Simon, but would be good to investigate it.

Kde Simon

Simon Home

Simon Benefit Projec Video demos

When I can talk to my computer and give it commands and queries like LaForge in Star Trek, then I'll be ready for speech input. Before then, no.

As for this latest Shuttleworth travesty, I'm starting to wonder if the conspiracy theories about him are true, that he's secretly working for Microsoft to destroy Linux from within. He's certainly doing a great job of it: come up with a distro where everything works really well, eliminate all the competing distros because they can't match that, then drive this now-dominant distro straight into the ground.

Khamul,...

The problem with conspiracy theories is that Occam's Razor and the so-called Hanlon's Razor get in the way,...

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.

@JaseP: Yes, that's true, but with him continuing to drive over a cliff with one brain-dead maneuver after another (when previously, Ubuntu was blowing away most other distros, mainly by being easy-to-install and manage, which is what made it so successful), you really have to wonder if this isn't one of those exceptions to the razors. Conspiracies do happen, after all; just look at covert stuff our (USA) government has done, or in the FOSS world, look at the SCO/BayStar/Microsoft conspiracy.

It's simple. He's the guy in the driver's seat,... He made (an executive) decision, and now he's obligated to follow through or look (even more like) a "insert your favorite disparaging term here." If he backed out of it, he'd look like he should be the VP of HP...

Mark. You get back here and get this dead mouse out of the kitchen this instant. Bad cat. Bad cat.

I was with a client today, and I watched how he used his computer. The process went somrthing like this.

Open an application, do something, close that application, Open another application, do something, close application, Open third application, do something, close application.

Which got me thinking, maybe GNOME and Cannonical and Microsoft are onto something. the vast maority of people never ever Multi process. It's always 1 application at a time.

Maybe we are the exception.

@tracyanne, or maybe he's doing what he can to avoid an OOM panic.

Quoting:Maybe we are the exception.

So true and that is why he is not listening. He is no dummy, he has done his research I am sure. The mistake he made is throwing the classic desktop interface away where he could have kept it and avoided all the backlash like KDE did & MS copied.

If his move [edited]: didn't make sense and a threat to MS, it wouldn't have rushed to copy and release its version of touch interface. But MS was smarter and kept the classic interface, or at least it had to for backward compatibility.

@tracyanne: How old was your client? That sounds like how someone who learned computers in the DOS days would work, or maybe Win95 (where having too many applications open at once was a guarantee of a BSOD).

I'm a system developer and I have a laptop here with an additional screen open.

I have open (and using concurrently):

1) Thunderbird 2) Firefox 3) A VM running Windows Server 4) Eclipse 5) Some nautilus file manager windows for moving files about. 6) A media player (Rhythmbox at the moment) 7) LibreOffice with some reference documents open.

At any time, I might be looking at PDFs, have shell boxes open to do compilations or to run vi, which I prefer for some kinds of file manipulation.

I honestly cannot conceive of a situation whereby I could get by without a) a mouse and b) multiple windows open and visible simultaneously. It seriously is not possible.

Interestingly, one of the things I miss most about working in a Windows environment is the ability to set a window to be "always on top". It's less of an issue with the 2-up display, but when I only have the one screen, it is often invaluable.

@Khamul, it's actuallty somethimng I notice among most of the people I deal with. Some of them have never used computers before I set them up with Linux. Even my partner, who does open multiple applications at once, runs all her applications at full screen, and always minimises each one before selecting a new one from the window list in the panel, even though I've explained to her that it is unnecessary ti minimise each one.

No the issue is deeper than some learned DOS/Windows 95 response. It's goes to something Helios wrote about... Analogue thinking in a Digital world. It's almost as if they believe there is no room for the second application while the first one is visible on the desktop.

I beleive it is this thought process that Unity and GNOME3 and Metro play up to.

There are several things I missed when using Windows

Window always on top.

Scroll through list without first having to click on the list

Delete, really delete without having to hold down the CTRL key

Multiple Virtual desktops (I'ver tried most of the applications that give you virtual desktops on Windows and they are crap)

Multiple Panels in the Filemanager (I hate that you have to have 2 instances of Windows Explorer to do what you can doo with multiple panels)

a decent CLI (even though I don't use the cli very much, having a decent cli for those occassions cannot be overstated)

Window blinds (the ability to roll a window up so that only it's title bar is visible is really useful, I use that a lot with window always on top)

The mouse is dead ?...?...? Now we have to type every time.....? But haven't they been complaining that the typing ( read command line ) is so stupid and we live now in a world of point and click

I am getting confluset

"Rationalization" or it's better known variant "marketing" are not to be confused with reason. Except when one is more interested in getting one's way than in being right.

Markie calls it the intent driven approach, I prefoer to call it the twenty questions approach. Jeez, I can more easily and quicky show my intent to the computer by clicking on a menu option.

Actually ThieleMcCabe, and David Sugar, two people who commented on the article make a couple of good points, HUD, and especially voice activated HUD makes really good sense in certain use cases, for example on mobile devices such as phones where you have to work hands free or can't use the virtual keyboard, in all centres, where you have people using very directional microphones, as an accessibility option for people who can't use a mouse or keyboard. Which brings up the other side of the coin, without voice activation HUD is for such people even more burdensome that the mouse keyboard option.

But as a general user interface, or as a replacment for a Menu system, as Mark intends, it's just an ego trip.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20120218

That's all I have to say on the matter.

@gus3

Great! Also take a look at the next day's UF 'toon against M$; Hilarious!