Slashdot Mirror

Might want to check out www.mirrorworlds.com. He is in the real world. And they have a shipping product.

From the company's press release

NEW HAVEN, CT - January 24, 2000 - Mirror Worlds Technologies announced today that it has been awarded patent number 6,006,227 from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for its innovative Lifestreams(TM) technology, which is emerging as both an office workgroup product and as an embedded feature in a new generation of Internet devices.

• Speech. See Portico for a real commercial product with pervasive use of a speech UI (if only the smarts were on my Newton....)
• Agents. Lots of work being done on how to make "smarter" user interfaces. Just do a query on any big search engine. Brenda Laurel's seminal Computers as Theater is a prime example.
• Information visualization, some of which is 3D but Edward Tufte's books are a well-known exception.
• CSCW, aka Computer-Supported Collaborative Work, including shared whiteboards and the like.
• Not to mention video conferencing, the web itself, video games, etc.

Completely new paradigms are also being worked on - Ken Perlin's Pad is one good example, as is David Gelertner's Lifestreams.

PDA intercases, at least the better ones, are also an area of active research. WinCE is mostly a scaled-down WIMP UI, but the Newton is not. The Newton makes pervasive use of gestures (and not just handwriting - even cut, copy, and paste), as well as sound, animation, and a lack of anything resembling a desktop, "saving" files, or even files at all at the user level.

General references to UI research include Ben Schneiderman's textbook (good for learning just how complex the field is) and Baecker et al's collection (which has some of the recent results) and the pages of SIGCHI, the ACM's Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction.

I thought I should point out that "Mirror Worlds Technologies, Inc." is a company, and not a book. Sure, we based our company name on the book. But as a company we produce a product, Lifestreams Office, and companies can't get by on "handwaving".

A lot of folks have found that Lifestreams is a powerful technology for storing and finding information with minimal effort.

Dr. Susanne Hupfer
Mirror Worlds Technologies, Inc.

Nielsen exposes the flaws of contemporary UIs brilliantly. At Mirror Worlds, we've developed a software solution that embraces the concepts Nielsen espouses: navigation by content and time rather than location; dynamic organization; and integration of diverse data types in a single interface.

Rather than building on the tired and insufficient file-folder hierarchy, we've abandoned it, freeing users from the need to worry about what a document is called, what program it was created in, and where it is stored. The result is an intuitive and effective solution we call "Lifestreams."

The first is Lifestreams, a file management concept created by David Gelernter, one of the Unabomber's better known victims. Lifestreams abandons hierarchical file systems entirely (from the user's perspective, anyway) in favor of a timeline, robust search capabilities, and saved searches. For more info on Lifestreams (and some of the weird commercial products that have arisen from it), check Gelernter's company Mirror Worlds. Current GUIs have taken baby steps toward this concept - you can save Sherlock searches in MacOS and use them the same way you would a folder, and BeOS has powerful queries. But neither system has had the guts to encourage users to rely on them.

The second is a system created by Jef Raskin, one of the principal inventors of the Macintosh. Raskin's system essentially had no file system interface. You turned it on by beginning to type a sentence; booting was instant, and your sentence appeared on screen, from the very first keystroke. If you needed some graphics, you went and got a graphics tool and started drawing on screen. If you neede to work on some old file, you had the system search for it. In ways, it was a lot lke Apple's aborted OpenDoc paradigm, but made more effective by building a computer around it from first principles, rather than shoehorning it into an existing PC system. Raskin's system eventually became the Canon Cat, an emasculated commercial failure that Canon bundled with a daisy wheel printer and sold as a secretarial aid. I looked around for nice links on the Cat but didn't find much; you can always try Jef Raskin's site.

There are more metaphors that take the SunLabs concept further. The neuron/brain model is common to a lot of these UI programs.

• Thought Stream is a Palm program that allows you to store information and organize it by associations or links between ideas.
• Thinkmap has generated a really neat Java applet with www.bacardi.com (must be 21 to enter ;) to create an interactive web site that should leave a lasting impression even on heavy drinkers.
• Natrificial has a software product called "The brain" that was so awesome, it was the first shareware product I ever purchased. The metaphor it uses for finding information is like that of SunLabs except it is better.
  I could create a "brain" whose central point is "college", around that point is college related stuff like: Chicago, beer, frat, and Kim. I tie the thought of Minneapolis to Kim since that's Kims home. Rob is also from Minneapolis but now he's in Chicago. Rob gets generated as having links to the existing Minneapolis and Chicago thoughts.
  Now when I road trip to Chicago next, I can navigate to that thought and see links to Rob (and thoughts tied to Rob in the distance), college (and things associated with college in the distance). Ain't that slick.
  And the beauty of this is that it's a slick UI for Windows (flames ignored) and the files can be imported into Thought Stream.
• MindManager is another Win-doze client with some neat functionality. It uses the powerful concept of Mindmapping techniques to capture ideas and designs plus it has some good web export functionality.
• Visual Mind is like MindManager above, only I think it's not as powerful.

Now if there was a product that merged the Lifestreams metaphor and "the brain" metaphor and included an HTML import/export function; I really doubt Mr. John Doe office worker would ever want to see a hierarchical or static 2D view of his files again.