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- Who says I want to stick my arm out 300 times a day and put a greasy finger on the screen? I am lazy. At least, DEVELOP KINECT FOR NOTEBOOKS YOU DUMB FUCKS. That would be a smart move (I would sit back and do a hand gesture in the air, while eating my ice scream. Yummy!)
  But really, we are lazy. If we wanted to waste a lot of energy moving screens, we would be clamoring for a Wii platform on which we would perform a little tap dance to open a folder. Great cardio! But I just do it in my other room.

- Why did Microsoft ignore *tons* of research on user interfaces? TONS. Hear, hear, a f*ing former Xerox f*ing PARC f*ing expert says it's F*ING DUMB (By the way: Ubuntu - you suck too - big, big time).

- The best interface for Windows was made by an expert: http://humanized.com/enso/ It uses modal touch. What? Yeah. Something to do with airline carriers and pilots not screwing the flight plan. I don't use the Start Menu, I don't go looking for clickitty thingys, I just hold tab and write: "open firefox" and - abracadabra - it opens.

  Please, "specialized press", check Enso out (it's free - now - and I am not affiliated with them) this out before coming to stupid conclusions about Windows 8 and its Grease Screen and Big Squares grand ideas for interfaces.

I use the search/run feature constantly. Metro worried me so much that it made me install Enso Launcher to avoid the "jarring" experience caused by switching back and forth with it. That said, I hope they don't back pedal on that. I'm genuinely curious to see if people accept it.

I dunno about genuine innovation; Maybe I'm missing the parallel but it looks a lot like Aza Raskin's Enso Launcher. Take a peek at the second half of this video.

I'm not faulting them for implementing it; After all, Enso Launcher looked fantastic but as far as I know never got much uptake and certainly never ran on linux. But I just think it's being forgetful to call this a new innovation.

It sounds like the article is proposing a solution very similar to Humanized's Enso Launcher.
http://humanized.com/enso/launcher/

I tried Enso for a bit. It seems like a nice concept, but one thing that annoyed me to no end was having to type "open" over and over. I want to open something by default.

Well people are just copying what came before Also there are modern day implementations.

Comparing this to "Launchy" is pretty silly. Recognize this for what it is, the first steps of a new wave of Interface Design brought about by Interface Engineering.
Ubiquity's pedigree is MUCH older, going all the way back to the Canon Cat and the late Jef Raskin's idea of The Humane Interface, this being a subset closer related to The Humane Editor and Aza Raskin's Enso.
The Humane Interface is, in fact, an entire rethinking of human computer interaction, restructured around what Cognitive Science has to say about human mental capabilities instead of a strange, cobbled together desktop metaphor and separate applications.

I completely agree with you (and many others). But there's certainly a class of user that would benefit from wizards and whatnots, at least on first run. Yes, they annoy you and me, but why can't there be a universal Gnome setting (or better yet, a freedesktop.org standard) that allows a "noob" bit to be set on a given user account?

Perhaps it could be more than a bit -- it could even be a scale. A few simple guidelines and (almost) everybody's happy.

>Jef Raskin. Then: Macintosh project creator, founder of Information Appliance. His excellent web site is still up. Author of well-respected book The Humane Interface. The project he's working on in PaW, the SwyftCard, was a minor success.

RIP Jef. On a lighter note, check out his son's work at Humanized

Edit: Looks like he just updated it. I guess someone informed him of Raskin's departure...

People love having choices, because having choices means having freedom. Well, we don't think this is necessarily a good thing when it comes to usability... For instance, Microsoft Windows provides you with at least three different ways to launch applications and services on your computer: desktop icons, a quick-launch bar, and a Start Menu.

Meanwhile...

Enso Launcher is designed to give you instant access to your applications and windows. With a few easily remembered keystrokes, you can launch an application, switch to a window by name, and control the state of your windows.

Windows has too many ways of launching applications, that's why they made one more. Thanks, Humanized!

People love having choices, because having choices means having freedom. Well, we don't think this is necessarily a good thing when it comes to usability... For instance, Microsoft Windows provides you with at least three different ways to launch applications and services on your computer: desktop icons, a quick-launch bar, and a Start Menu.

Meanwhile...

Enso Launcher is designed to give you instant access to your applications and windows. With a few easily remembered keystrokes, you can launch an application, switch to a window by name, and control the state of your windows.

Windows has too many ways of launching applications, that's why they made one more. Thanks, Humanized!

...with the unibrow/mutton-chop combo or an awkwardly-popped collar.

http://www.humanized.com/enso/launcher/fingertips.php

It looks to me that it solves a problem that does not exist for a vast majority of users. Why one would want anything like this in a Firefox is beyond me.

and monster chops to boot! (from the About Us page: http://www.humanized.com/gfx/header_aboutus.jpg )

I hate to be one to point out the shortcomings of others, but how can you expect to be a good user interface designer when something as simple as trimming some hair seems a daunting task?

From the article: His design philosophy extends from the belief that the best kind of interface is no interface at all.

From the site: 500 - Internal Server Error

Nice proposal.

Just try to think of something else when looking at those screenshots.

Check out heir User Interface of the Day blog entries:
http://www.humanized.com/weblog/

But what's the difference, from the end user's perspective? I mean really, do you honestly think that the average desk jockey cares that their information is "stuck" in Excel or Word? I don't think they do, as they will never in a million years try to open those files with anything other than Excel or Word.

All they know is that it works like they expect. Maybe I'm not making my opinions clear: this doesn't necessarily equate to "it works right." It simply works reliably like they expect it to. And because of that, it costs them NO thought. They do their thing, it does its thing, and we all move on.

There seems to be some general misconception in responses to my post that I expect to use Word and Excel willy nilly and then have the open source community fix other problems I have for free. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I expect nothing outside of how Word or Excel, for example, will respond to some command. That's not for free, and it's not necessarily the right solution. But it's reliable. If a user has to adjust to some dumb thing Word does, they will. JUST LIKE THEY WOULD FOR OPEN OFFICE, except for the fact that they don't perceive it to be worth it to them to do so for OpenOffice. This is often based on what their office does, not what they personally believe.

Cars are a good example, now that you bring it up. They SHOULD run on hydrogen, have central drivers' seats instead of offset ones, should all have smooth automatic transmissions, and should allow great visibility in all directions. None of these things are true, though. Why? Because the cost of building them this way is prohibitive, and yet is dwarfed by the cost of CONVINCING consumers that they should be this way. There was a great theoretical discussion recently at the humanized website about different ways to differentiate between forward and reverse in a car. Fascinating, but it's not like you're going to get Detroit/Japan/China/Germany to change the fundamental way you set the transmission in your car. It would cause chaos and would quickly kill off anyone who has been driving a car their whole life and can't easily adapt to a new transmission.

I think my point is that Office and Windows are going nowhere -- we have them for the time being. And they're not evil. They're not perfect (in fact, you could argue that certain versions are fundamentally flawed), but they're not evil either. Again, flawed != evil. So rather than bark about how sucky they are, why not simply accept that there are some things for which they are appropriate and be done? If I'm working with a client who prefers Microsoft proprietary formats (and while I don't want to start ANOTHER fight, if it's used by an overwhelming majority of the world, is it still a proprietary format or is it a standard?), why SHOULD I fight the good fight? Word, for example, is simply a tool to create a certain type of document. If it exists on my hard drive either because I bought it or my employer did, why shouldn't I just use it and be done? I could download a big executable and install OpenOffice to emulate Word or Excel, or I could simply use Word or Excel.

I understand and, in theory, agree with the righteous, windmill-fighting answers, but that's because I read Slashdot. The typical user couldn't give less of a damn about the business issues behind how difficult it is for them to make a Word file. We can bark all we want around here about it, but it won't change anything about how the vast majority of users deal with stuff day in and day out. Nor should it, perhaps.

Free open source software is fine -- I use and support it when I can, and appreciate it for what it is (and don't expect support or features I'm not paying for). However, many don't use it. And that's fine, too. There seems to be some feeling around here, though, that it's the open source way or the highway, and that Microsoft embodies everything that is evil and wrong about software development. In some ways that may be true, but the brush with which

The install for this thng requires 25MB of disk space. For a little program that supposedly just launches apps from the keyboard. It has to be doing something they're not telling you.

They admit that it has remote update, so it has a built-in security vulnerability. Vista won't let it run for that reason.

What did they do, load it up with adware?

What I would rather have is a facility that can spell check any text in any application. That way I can have a single dictionary, instead of every application having its own (with its own code base, causing its own bugs and its own maintenance headaches, etc).

Something like what these guys are doing.