Posts tagged Moving
Moving Away from Menus: Is Ubuntu’s HUD Change We Can Believe In?
Jan 25th
Canonical and the Ubuntu folks have taken a lot of risks in the Unity interface that ships with Ubuntu Linux. One of the things that the company has been leading towards is the Head-Up Display (HUD), a new tool for controlling applications that moves away from the traditional menu interface that debuted decades ago with the Xerox PARC GUI.
Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth blogged about the new interface design today, with a description, screenshot and a video demonstrating the use of HUD.
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Understanding HUD
What’s wrong with the current method of doing things? Shuttleworth says:
“When they get nested, navigating the tree can become fragile. They require you to read a lot when you probably already know what you want. They are more difficult to use from the keyboard than they should be, since they generally require you to remember something special (hotkeys) or use a very limited subset of the keyboard (arrow navigation). They force developers to make often arbitrary choices about the menu tree (‘should Preferences be in Edit or in Tools or in Options?’), and then they force users to make equally arbitrary effort to memorise and navigate that tree.”
Instead of a nested tree of options, users will have a "vocabulary UI" that’s "closer to the way users think" according to Shuttleworth.
The Canonical folks have been re-thinking the standard desktop layout for some time, and part of that has been trying to replace the application window menus with a global menu similar to the one in Mac OS X. According to Shuttleworth, that’s all been leading up to HUD.
"The HUD concept has been the driver for all the work we’ve done in unifying menu systems across Gtk, Qt and other toolkit apps in the past two years. So far, that’s shown up as the global menu. In 12.04, it also gives us the first cut of the HUD."
The Apple Lisa, image from Graphical User Interface Gallery
Here’s how the HUD works. Instead of having the traditional "File," "Edit," "View" menus (and so on) users will pull down a menu to type in commands. So if I want to change preferences I’d start typing "pref" and (in theory) the HUD will suggest commands that match that.
Shuttleworth says that the HUD would support fuzzy matching so users could be able to type "settings" and still get "preferences" and so forth. Shuttleworth even says that it will learn what commands users use most often, so it can prioritize commands that are used more frequently.
Open The Pod Bay Doors HAL… Er, HUD
But that’s not all. Shuttleworth says that the HUD will tie into system functions as well as application-specific ones. So users should be able to use The HUD to do things like manage IM status and so forth.
Ultimately, and this probably ties into Canonical’s hopes and dreams of using Ubuntu to power TVs, the HUD could be voice-driven. The menu interface that relies heavily on pointer-driven activity is clunky for a television. Being able to talk to your TV to change channels, set up recordings and whatnot would be a big improvement over navigating menus.
Shuttleworth says that Canonical wants "to make it easy to talk to any application, and for any application to respond to your voice. The full integration of voice into applications will take some time. We can start by mapping voice onto the existing menu structures of your apps. And it will only get better from there."
Change We Can Believe In?
As we all know, users love change. (Where’s that sarcasm font when you need it?) But strong ideas backed by equally strong implementations can win out. Looking at the video provided by Canonical and the description of the HUD, it seems like a usable alternative to existing application menus.
The main objection to the HUD is discoverability. I can easily adapt to HUD for functions that I know are supported by an application, but what about functions I’m unaware of? You can explore the menus for an application and find new (to you) features, but the HUD doesn’t support that. For now, Shuttleworth says that the traditional menus will still be around – but they still need to solve the discoverability problem.
If you’re eager to test it, it’s available in an add-on repository that works with Ubuntu’s 12.04 pre-releases. If all goes well, this will land in Ubuntu 12.04 and users will have their hands on it right away.
What do you think? Is the HUD the way of the future? Should Ubuntu (and other desktops) keep the menu?
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Local SEO and Moving Business: 5 Steps, 4 Lessons – SEOmoz (blog)
Dec 22nd
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Local SEO and Moving Business: 5 Steps, 4 Lessons
SEOmoz (blog) This would affect our own local SEO efforts and so I documented our action and have provided some conclusions to help others not have the same problems we have had! We spent a month working on the Isle of Harris (my wife's family live there). … |
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Apprenda Eases Moving .Net Apps to the Cloud
Nov 14th
If you are looking for a way to move your .NET app into the cloud, then you probably have heard of Apprenda by now. We covered their launch earlier this year, and today they have v3 available.
New features included in Apprenda 3.0 are support for nearly any .NET web or SOA application by way of its software layer that enterprises can use quickly and easily. Apprenda has beefed up its APIs and included ones for distributed caching, publish/subscribe systems, message brokering, and application metering. All to make building more complex apps easier.
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You can view a brief intro video above that explains what they do, and how they offer their private PaaS where you can combine a variety of Windows services into a single cloud-based resource pool.
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Managing Cultural Change When Moving to Cloud
Oct 29th
Adopting cloud computing requires a fundamental shift in organizational culture and business processes–both within and outside of IT. In fact, managing this change may be the biggest challenge many companies face when moving to the cloud.
Based on a survey of 500 North American IT decision-makers and in-depth interviews with 50 CIOs, global business consulting firm Bain & Company found some common themes and success strategies. Learn more about Bain & Company’s findings in “The New CIO Agenda: Intel Cloud Computing Insights 2011.”
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HP: PC Business Not Moving Anywhere, WebOS ‘the Next Piece of Work’
Oct 28th
It’s no surprise that the new-and-re-improved Hewlett-Packard has come to the conclusion this afternoon, under newly-minted President and CEO Meg Whitman, that it will not spin off the Personal Systems Group (PSG) division responsible for producing PCs and tablets. This move was announced after the close of stock trading Thursday afternoon.
But one of the first questions analysts asked during an HP investors’ press conference this afternoon was the fate of its tablet unit. Today, Whitman made it absolutely clear that any tablet PCs HP may produce in the coming year will center around Windows 8, not the webOS platform that HP acquired in the Palm buyout just over one year ago.
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In the face of what PSG division EVP Todd Bradley called “enormous economic pressure,” he added that the company’s thinking on tablet PC manufacturing “hasn’t changed” since Whitman took over the badly-damaged CEO position from Léo Apotheker just five weeks ago. When asked to clarify how that thinking did not change from, and where it’s not going, Bradley reiterated that the company will focus on Windows 8-based tablets — in so doing, almost intimating that a Win8 tablet is more imminent than Microsoft’s preview process might lead customers to believe.
But Bradley added that HP is continuing to work with former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein — still an HP employee, though no longer an executive — to determine the ultimate fate of webOS.
“We’re continuing to focus on a Microsoft-based tablet that we have, and ones that’ll develop on Windows 8,” Bradley told one analyst. “I think from a webOS perspective, that’s kind of the next piece of work to complete. The whole team — Meg, Cathie [Lesjak, HP CFO], myself, Jon Rubinstein working very, very hard and as quickly as we can to make the right decisions about that product.”
To which CEO Whitman added the following: “I think we need to be in the tablet business. We’re certainly going to be there with Windows 8. So we’re going to make another run at this business, and we’re going to make a decision about the long-term future of webOS within HP over the next couple of months. As soon as we make that decision, we’ll let you know on that, because many people have said to me, ‘Isn’t the webOS decision just completely tied to PSG?’ The answer to that is actually, no. WebOS has obviously use in the PSG business, but also in other businesses that we have. We have to make a more holistic decision around webOS, which is coming to a town near you soon, I hope.”
Whatever that last bit of coming attractions meant, Whitman later reiterated that “soon” did not mean any time prior to November 21, when the company is scheduled to issue its next quarterly earnings report. HP made no warnings with respect to that report today, although CFO Lesjak did report that the key reason for HP’s decision to keep PSG centered around the $1 billion of annual revenue it’s certain to continue adding to the company, and the $1.5 billion it would cost to spin it off.
“As you know, we are one of the largest purchasers of components worldwide,” stated Lesjak. “We ship two PCs every second, and a server about every 15 seconds. This scale helps our gross margins for both PSG and enterprise server, storage, and networking.”
Although CEO Whitman did imply that one possibility still being considered for webOS was a transfer to another division (evidently one that does not produce tablets), toward the end of today’s analysts’ conference, she gave an awfully strong hint that her final inclination would be to somehow transfer webOS out of the company altogether.
“One of my observations is that HP tries to do a lot of things,” remarked Whitman. “And I am a big believer in doing a small number of things really, really well — set ‘em up, knock ‘em down, set ‘em up, knock ‘em down. So Cathie [Lesjak] and I are trying to lead a process, which is, what are the real bets we’re going to make in 2012, and let’s do those really well, and position the company for a better 2013 and a better 2014.”
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Moving Beyond Disaster Recovery with Business Continuity Appliances
Oct 21st
At first glance, disaster recovery and business continuity may sound like the same thing. In a sense, they are, because their real difference is a matter of scale.
Disasters are just that: disasters. Full-blown events that pick up your company and drop it on the ground like it was a toy (sometimes, quite literally). But business continuity is something you need for subtler, yet just as important events, like a downed payroll server, or a file getting deleted that brings your web server to a screeching halt.
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For situations like this, business continuity appliances (BCAs) are a very appropriate solution. What BCAs do, simply, is clone whatever servers to which you attach them. If it’s a physical BCA, typically you just attach the device to the network, point it at the desired machines and off you go. Virtual appliances, such as those offered by VMware, comport themselves in much the same manner.
Brian Proffitt is a veteran technology journalist, analyst, and author with experience in a variety of technologies, including cloud, virtualization, and consumer devices. Follow him on Twitter @TheTechScribe and Google+ at +Brian Proffitt.
BCAs are pretty much set-it-and-forget-it devices, able to clone away with little to no management needed. It’s important to remember, though, that BCAs are not meant to be disaster recovery devices. They’re meant to handle the foibles in a workplace that can ruin someone’s or, in some cases, bring the business to a standstill.
BCAs are located on-site, typically, and as such make poor disaster recovery tools. Businesses who rely on them for this purpose are just asking for trouble. Better to have firm disaster recover plan in place, independent of any BCAs. (See our chart below for some sample products in this space.)
| Name/URL | Price | Features |
| SonicWALL Continuous Data Protection Series | $1,599-$14,999 (List) | Windows agent installation Integrated Microsoft application support Multi-platform support |
| Blackbird | Starting at $299/month | Rapid restore and testing Subscription based |
| Zenith ARCA | $2,999-$11,999 (List) | Scalable Supports 25 remote connection Rapid failover |
| QuorumLabs onQ Appliance | $4,000/year or $6,000 lifetime | One-click recovery Local and remote support Bandwidth throttling Lifetime and subscription pricing |
Also, like disaster recovery, the use of BCAs will need to be planned. Since IT funding is limited, you can’t just plug these devices willy-nilly into your network. Prioritize what applications and servers needs to have the highest level of business continuity, and implement on those objectives.
Virtual BCAs can, or course, mitigate the costs of any business continuity plan. With lower power, space, and hardware overhead, virtual BCAs may be just the solution your organization needs.
Business continuity, when implemented properly, can be just the thing to get you out of a jam when system availability is a business-critical need, even without disasters.
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