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GUI Research - Is it Still Being Done?
Davor Buvinic asks: "In my spare time I like to study about GUIs. Recently,I was amazed with the new design that I saw in the previews of the future MacOS X, until I discovered in theWeb that things like file dialogs attached to windows dated from the earliest prototypes from the Apple Lisa (July 1981). My question is: Is there any news in GUI design? The newest design I probed was Rob Pike's ACME user interface for programmers. Is anybody
(individual or research center) working in a new GUI design? I mean a GUI for the mainstream, no immersive virtual 3D environments, that probably need a powerful Silicon Graphics to run." Have we done as much with the GUI as we possibly can, or are there other reasons behind the lack of technical innovation in most desktops?
Yeah, that way they can we can get banner ads pumped straight to our skulls. "Hmm, I'd really like some Strawberry Quik right now... Oh, and I really should buy Office 2000." Yulp, sounds great.
Perhaps instead of reinventing the 2D GUI interface (how our we interpret the screen), we should focus more on how we interface with the machine itself...
You see them all the time in little Internet toys, and media programs. Look at the KAI graphics stuff for example. Look at any of the "skinnable" applets. I've seen some MP3 players that look downright weird.
The problem is, I hate most of them.
I'm afraid that GUIs (as they exist in the mainstream now) have been hard-coded into our brains. New GUIs have a backwards compatibility problem like you wouldn't believe; they have to be backwards compatible with people.
Unfortunately, we've learned the current GUIs so well, that any major departure is just "wrong."
In consumer desktops, if you change things radically, you are apt to lose the average users. I personally hate vast changes in design, as visual cues are a lot of the way I navigate. You make someone learn a brand new way, without careful incremental change, and you have the common person fighting their machine....
Then again, I'm not sure there is much difference, since most people use Windows and fight their machines all the time anyway. :P
In space, no one can hear you moo.
Check out this link to see what's going on at CMU's HCII. All sorts of wacky stuff...
Isn't TWIN pretty new (Textmode WINdow manager)? and one thing I'd like to see is some form of 3d gui (probably a while off tho).
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
The flip side of this is that there has been essentially no breakthroughs in monitor development either. every couple of month some new story about reasonably priced flat panel monitors or 3D monitors appears, only to fade into obscurity. Maybe when desktop realestate gets bigger than 17" diagonal and more than 2d we'll see some novel approaches. In the end though "form follows function". Just as the shortest distance between two points is a straigt line.
HelixCode is a new, cutting-edge GUI for Linux that shows promise.
A lot of inovative design.
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If my facts are wrong then tell me. I don't mind.
Secondly, there's much refining being done in the area of the GUI. Just look at some of the enlightenment screenshots to see what I'm talking about. Different, but very powerful. (Those screenshots have sucked more than a few new users into Linux!)
Everything else has been a "refinement" process in the area of GUI research. So, here's my idea for a new GUI:
One of the best features of the newest refined GUI's is customizeability - the ability to choose what the OS looks like. Let's take that to the maximum - a generic plugin-based system that lets skin authors completely change the feel of the OS. The User Interface would load plugin modules (swappable at will) that perform the following functions:
- Task management - switching between windows on the screen.
- File management - browsing the files on the hard disk
- Program launching - starting up programs from some sort of menu
- Menu management - if one is loaded, the active program's menus are displayed in this widget, ala MacOS X or NeXT.
- Others I can't think of right now...
This would allow users to completely change the look and feel of their desktop interface. The UI could switch from a convincing Mac clone to a Windows clone to a BeOS clone to a Palm clone to something completely new and uncharted in a matter of seconds! Of course, it would still be based on the same ideas of dialog, widgets, etc. as current interfaces, but it would be a step towards complete user-control of man-machine interaction.Check out bottomquark to discuss the latest science news.
GrnArrow
They're pretty old as far as GUIs go, and they work. Yet no one uses them. Why? I downloaded the GTKPieMenu widget and played with the test. It's amazing how much easier those things are to use than regular menus (once you get over the disorientation, of course). Are there any maintstream programs using any widget set that actually use pie menus? I'm sure there's plenty being done with new GUIs, but if nothing uses them it's not likely to be obvious unless they're all making press releases.
have you ever thought about the ask behind reteaching computer interfaces to everybody? It'd be nothing more than an annoyance to have to relearn how to use a computer when all you want to do is type up a document. if an interface works, you should use it. Oh my god, I've met people who didn't know how to use a mouse, and when you think about that... a radical new interface designs don't sound too appealing. especially for tech support people. however, there is going to be a time when idiot proofing the interface and making it 'friendly and familiar' is going to get too much in the way of progress. then we'll see how the morons ^H^H^H^H^H^H end-users take to new interfaces
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
I think with the limitation of a 2D display with less than 100 dpi, we have approached the limit of what can reasonable be done with a modern GUI. The original GUIs came about as the result of cheaper raster based video hardware becoming available and supplanting the previous character based hardware.
The attempts at 3D GUIs don't do anything for me, when the display really isn't 3D, and that icon in the distance is illegible because my screen's resolution sucks. We need better and radically different hardware before any major advances in user interface design can occur.
-josh
I read an interesting, online-only article at Linux Journal about a 18 months ago on a topic called "color reactance". Essentially it advocated (and partially demonstrated) how you could have programs set "traffic lights" (or window frame colors, or something) to indicate states. For instance, a program that needs attention could be set to flash yellow whereas one that is finished could flash green (or whatever).
When I first say the Aqua screenshots, I thought Apple had done this. They have a trio of traffic lights on the upper right of every window. But it turns out they are just eye-candied versions of the old close/minimize/maximize buttons.
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I wish all the current OSes I use would follow that one...
circa75.com
On the first point - regarding any new work/development being done for GUI's - I don't know. I'm not a GUI desginer/creator, and have little interest in doing so. I'm quite happy with how my GUI works/looks now.
Which brings me to my main point. While it may be possible for new GUI development to be around, it is almost certainly restrained by the GUI's we currently have around. Most people know how to get around in windows, and most other GUI's are similar enough so you can learn them almost 'intuitively' (I haven't seen any that are drastically different... from a base user's perspective)
Seeing as most people are familiar with the windows GUI, any new and 'radical' GUI will be shot down, just because there's not likely to be many people who will want to bother with learning something completely new. Using a GUI isn't intuitive. Most people learn how to use a GUI by either being shown, or just by watching someone else. Anything that's new, and different, won't be used because very few people will know how to use it & show it to other people.
As such, I don't see any new great inspired GUI's coming alive. Everything will be based on what we currently see now.
Note: this isn't to say that someone won't come up with a faster way of displaying/rendering a GUI... just that it will look similar to what we have today
If the DOJ would stop hammering Microsoft with lawsuits they would be able to continue to innovate the competition out of the market and go back to doing what they do best... designing the very best interfaces and software. Unfortunately they haven't been able to do this since 1979.
I don't know if this counts as research, but blender (www.blender.nl) has a totally fresh (if hard to use at first) take on a space-saving GUI.
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there were still some interesting things. I don't recall the links but I think there was a lense based interface being worked on for a while (idea being you could look at your desktop through the normal lense then pull different types of lenses out and 'see' new properies of the system.) I'm thinking xerox park maybe?
There are also the hypertree widgets that are pretty cool. There are some java demos of those somewhere.
researchers do everything (assuming they can get some kind of funding)
I know this isn't exactly the topic, but it has something to do with it.
3D GUI's suck. Alot. There are a few of them being made now, and I've tried couple, and their stupid. Its alot easier to just hit START, PROGRAMS, WORD, then to walk a half a mile through your virtual house just to get to the Office menu.
Besides, we don't need anymore overhead than there already is.
Perhaps interfacing with other people? Go outside!
NEWS: cloning, genome, privacy, surveillance, and more!
What is interesting is that GUIs have until now been limited by their input devices, having been tied to the mouse for over a decade. In all the years it has been around, the mouse has hardly changed. Okay, scroll wheels and context sensitive buttons have been a big improvement, but it is still faster to type in a wordprocessor and access menus using the keyboard. Some combination keyboard/trackball devices are available and these reduce the distance the hand has to travel compared to the keyboard compared to using keyboard and mouse. However, I feel that the real breakthrough in GUIs will come when voice recognition kicks off. Already, ViaVoice can open a program and move it around the screen.
Having said that, a scroll mouse is ideal for browsing the web, so I guess it's a case of horses for courses.
It really depends.. it's kindof mushy.
;-)
Most of the hard academic research on GUI's has already been "done." (Meaning that people going from government grants will find it hard to compete with some of the other new technologies)
The most research is being done on 3D desktops. (Microsoft has one, Berlin, SGI, etc) that take the traditional file managers and twist and turn.
MIT has a textual "GUI." It's really not so much a GUI as it is a different way to present large sets of data in a minimalist fashion. (Think the Matrix..it maps text on 3D curves. Books essentially "rotate" pages constantly... at least that's what I remember it as).
Another minimalist was Rob Pikes 8 1/2 (used on the Plan9 OS). This reminds me of emacs on crack. But it is a very effective way of managine text content.
But to be fair, people are pretty much in love with their buttons and menus et cetera. Most of the GUI work being done is implementations and fancifull type stuff.
I'm on the implementation side. I'm working on getting GTK on the X server side. That way you shift the drawing operations to the server and keep the client happy just handling events and widget control. The amount of communications between processes will DRAMATICALLY be reduced. Plus it will be 100% backwards compatable.
Then maybe I can convince someone to rewrite XIE into something more like imlib2
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Georgia Tech has a Graphics and Usability Lab within its School of Computing. A couple of years ago they had a few demonstrations on what people were working. Most of them were not GUI's per se, but one of the main things they were working on was interface -- through VR, Voice Recognition, Intuitive design, etc. :)
There is research going on there, peeps.
They are looking for volunteers if you're interested in helping out. I met them on a list-serv I was subscribed to and their work is very interesting.
As previously stated, the focus has shifted from GUI developement to other aspects. Nevertheless, you may want to try looking here (in German) for what there is.
Since the Mac, most of the GUI has really not changed. As we all know, even a lot of the mac was borrowed. There are attempts to create a "3D Environment" for the PC, but I think everyone has decided that we are as far as we can go with GUIs on contemporary technology. In order for a GUI revolution, what we need is a new interface. (Perhaps those 3D LCDs will be enough? only time will tell).
CLI's rely on human memory... we need to learn to speak the computer's "language", and often need to remember what the computer is currently up to. GUI's rely on our visual pattern recognition abilities. We "see" the commands we want to execute, and have a "finder" or "taskbar" to remind us what is going on. In both cases, the interface is driven by our choices of how we want to communicate with the system, and once you make that decision, a lot of the rest of the design is mostly asthetics.
The change will come when an interface that is obviously better than typing and clicking comes along. Whatever it is, it will need to be enough of a step up to be worth learning. There have been hundreds of "better" keyboards, but they don't get adopted by people because they are not enough of an improvement on the crappy qwerty (or dvorak) that we already know how to use. The next step to succeed will most likely be something completely different than a keyboard, and it will introduce the need for a radiacally different UI.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
That point aside, there is still new gui work going on all over. I am a gui programmer, writing a NEW gui as we speak. The limits of computers have not been reached and there are always new applications, new software coming out. We don't keep re-writing a file manager. And of course, these new application need guis.
- Every time you try something new, the mainstream complain that it isn't enough like the old, and
- Most changes are just to be differenct, to distinguish your UI from someone elses.
The second thing results in crap like MS's horizontal file dialogs instead of vertical, and things like the quicktime interface which is an enigma to everyone that hasn't spent the time needed to figure it out. What do four dots mean again?The first thing is what keeps major overhauls of existing UI's from happening.
I've done lot's of research into GUI design myself, and it boils down to: only design and use something new if it's going to make using the product easier. Unfortunately, many people nowadays (Apple, for example) go way off the deep end on design, with little respect for the user experience.
There's lots of outdated concepts, too, like real world metaphors...why limit yourself to what some poor designer had to cram into a 15cm x 2cm area of a portable CD player?
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Stupid sexy Flanders.
For an analagous example, why aren't PowerPC chips more popular than the x86 variety? Or Alphas? Or UltraSparcs? Because even while those chips offer the superior performance that the consumer desires (hey, the better FP and IO performance, the more frames you get in Quake3A), the market dictates that the money is in incremental performance increases on the current standard.
Suppose you offered a consumer PC, complete with all the requisite software, but it was decidedly not Wintel compliant. Surely the more adventurous nerds would buy (Linux on PPC, anyone?), but the vast majority of the population would need significant insentive, like the dog can figure it out (eg. MacOS).
In the same way, any innovation in user interface is stunted because now that we've spent so much time teaching people the Wintel Compliant way of doing things, any deviation is unacceptable. That interface might actually me more intuitive, easier to use, more efficient, but because its deviant, it has a learning curve, and the vast majority of people are so afraid of their computers that any change is really an unrealistic request.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
Well, here at WUSTL, we have one professor who supposedly does user interfaces full time (although his web page blows).
Also, there is a whole lab devoted to "visualization, which while their web page shows a bit of an emphasis towards video/multimedia, they do to a lot of work on data presentation and control layout.
I can't find any web resources for it, but there's a neat display on somebody's research into CHI (computer-human interaction) where they visualized the execution of a program very well, and then tied the visualization to execution control, such that you could very easily set optimization/execution priorities.
I suppose none of this is really straight GUI research, but more of CHI research with graphical focus.
I really like the Brain download. It's only win32, but a really new approach for the desktop.
I think there is alot of room for improvement of the existing designs, but little need for new designs...
What new widgets do we need? Sure, we can always make a few more, but, pretty much, the ones we've got are simple, ubiquitous, and do a good job.
I'm a Java GUI developer, and I have only found one example of a widget i needed that wasn't included in Swing.. I wrote it and put it in a bean, so now i'm fine, but really, there's not alot they left out.
wish
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I design GUIs for web based applications. I'm pretty convinced that the web killed (by dilution of focus) any kind of focussed improvement of the GUI as we know it (i.e. by a GUI team).
However, by suddenly handing over GUI development to millions of GUI novices, we have seen (and are seeing) some really cool new GUI development. I think most of the rollover effects you now see in GUIs (ie. the colored buttons in Aqua) were inspired from the ubiquitous use of image rollovers on web sites.
The problem is, with everyone creating everything (and being doomed to reinvent it, poorly) on the web, GUI paradigms are being broken down and morphed on fast forward. I'm not sure if that means that, as a whole, users will be forced to become bolder and more intelligent when exploring GUIs (I doubt it), or that everything that isn't Winlike will be ignored. In my current experience, it's something in between. I guess only the future will tell.
just my blog and pix
Yes.. GUI's are being researched, at least in the academia field. Being a current graduate research assistant, I've had the pleasure (yeah, right) of having to work in a Visual Programming Language environment that is being developed at my university. We are currently developing intuitive GUI's that are the result from doing numerous cognitive walkthroughs on previous versions of our VPL.
While much of the basics of human interaction and GUIs was worked out years ago (at Xerox and Apple) there are still people thinking of better ways to do things. Check out Bruce Tognazzini's web site AskTog for some coverage of this topic. He has tutorials on user interface design, cogent criticism of current GUIs, suggestions for improvements, as well as sundry and other essays.
We do invent new looks all the time, but no new feels. You have a huge set of different window managers and themes, each providing the same feautures.
We are stuck in the desktop- and tools- and windows-methafors. You must start a tool (program) to edit your picture. You have folders, either as a tree, or as windows with icons that can be clicked to open new windows. You have windows which can overlay each other, but their placement is largely up to the user.
There are ver few new things coming up. And the fresh air is old. Take a look at the The ROX Desktop for example. A new and cool idea. Which is old.
I think the majure problem is that people are spo used to how it works now, that they can not come up with something totally different any more.
And to opose myself, there are some new ideas, like the PalOS, where you don't have files, and in particular, you don't have "save". You modify your text/picture/whatever directly. Nothing is "in RAM" and must be "saved". But that is one of the few new things I've seen...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
psDoom is based upon Dennis Chao's Doom Sysadmin Tool project, which also jots has some further thoughts on the application of this concept to actual process management in an environment with multiple users and administrators. This actually made the front page of Slashdot last year.
I remember one project involved adding some sort of tactile feedback via phantom haptics to WIMP systems. Doesn't strike me as that cool but there no less. Also, a lot of gui research is being done on (3d)sketching/gestural systems and widgets for 3d manipulation.
You could call a lot of the recent palm stuff gui research. It's pretty different than anything I've ever seen.
jeb
There have been some recent slashdot articals showing new monitor technoligies, some with true 3d. I think that we have done all that can be done with curent monitor technoligies, and need some new hardware to get drastic improvments on GUIs. Once we have a floating image instead of a 2d flat screen, the posibilities with GUIs are endless.
Jon
- zoomable UIs (Pad++)
- two-handed user interfaces (e.g. toolglasses and magic lenses)
- smarter desktops(e.g. Apple Data Detectors, LiveDoc, CyberDesk)
The ACM CHI and UIST conferences over the past 10 years are full of good stuff that hasn't made it to production yet. It'd be great to see some of these ideas incorporated into open source projects.Looks like it will be fun to mess with. Screen shots/info up at: http://floach.pimpin.net/dimension.shtml
"please could you stop the noise im tryin a get some REST? from all the unbornchikkenVoicesin my head?"
There has been shockingly little innovation in the core fundamentals of computing. It has been accurately, if simplistically, stated that the entire history of personal computers has been one of reinventing what happened on mainframes 30 years prior.
Nearly all of the important innovations in the GUI took place prior to 1970. Ditto CPU design, the OS kernel, programming languages, storage, networking, etc. All that we have done since 1970 is improve the implementation.
What have we invented since 1980?
Umm... hyperlinked multimedia (combining some of the better ideas from the 1940s through 60s). The microkernel and multithreading (minor refinements of 1969 kernel technology). Oh, wait, here's one: Distributed component software. And, of course, the blind user license agreement. Yuck.
I think the best interface is that which is natural to people. I'd like to see a computer display that is like (electronic) paper and I could input a number of ways including writing on the "paper".
Imagine also, a stack of 52 electronic-display cards you could play cards and a computer could calculate probabilities for you based onthe cards it senses in your hand; you could use the cards as cue cards as you prepare for a speech (as notes are displayed on each of them)
Moving from a command line text interface to a graphic interface was an amazing revolution. The creation of a GUI made it more like working on a "desktop". Moving to a physical interface is natural and would be a further advancement.
There have also been many studies showing that the supiority of DVORAK is a myth.
It's the 21st Century Do you know what your government is doing
The Windowing GUI was easy because its mission was to be analogous to everyday, familiar paper systems. While it's not exactly like paper, for the most part it is close enough. To move beyond paper, we must think about better ways to work *without* computers. Then, get the computer to simulate that.
I find I am constantly dreaming of where ui will go next and I don't just mean new types of skins for enlightenment or consistent hot keys, but the really new way of doing things.
There is that one browser for windows, it's called the 'brain' or 'my brain' (or something? anyone?) I couldn't find it on the web just now, so no link, but the main feature is a new way to lay out info that focuses on the links instead of the files. But it hardly seemed to add anything by changing the paradigm, so I don't believe it has taken off.
My idea for a major leap in ui design comes from the few years where I had a cubicle with no windows nearby (actual windows looking outside!). I developed some pretty bad insomnia because I was out of touch with the day/night cycle and working 15 hour days. Additionally, I'd lived in Alaska for a few years immediately before this, and so was already extra sensitive to the diurnal cycle.
What occured to me was to match a rendered light source to the actual position of the sun (or moon for the late night bunch) shining on to specular and reflection texture layers covering everything in the graphic shell. the background could match the weather in your zip code. cloudy days would look like cloudy days, maybe making the windows and icons wet looking, etc etc.
This would tie the computer into the local environment and really cut down on the over-immersion problem. And yes, there is a real problem for coders and other heavy users getting sucked into their machine and coming out in a daze 12 hours later.
I have discussed this with an openGL savvy friend of mine, but he dismissed it because the 2d support is so awful. I guess we are still waiting for anti-aliased text under X, much less an entirely rendered shell, right? any thoughts on this?
I haven't really begun to work on it, but would love to see it someday. By way of a caveat, please give me some credit and input if you decide you want to develop this. my permanent email address is steerpike00-at-yahoo.com. I figure this could be hacked out in about 6 months if we got on it.
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
I personally think BeOS has done the best GUI of anything i've ever seen or used. I have tried many of the Linux GUIs (E, etc) and none are very intuitive or useful on a serious day to day basis for me.
I eat the flesh off the living, and I vote!
You can paint weird things [and] make odd sounds but calling it art doesn't make it so.
Let's remember that most of what we take for granted in modern media (animated banner ads, sampling keyboards, anime (at least in the US), video games) would have baffled and irritated people half a century ago.
Media changes. We adopt shorthand. It adapts to us and we adapt to it. There's absolutely no reason to assume that we've reached the ultimate in user-interface design.
Corollary to Moore's Law: The IQ of new computer owners is declining.
Plan 9's 8.5 aims at simplifying how text is used with computers. 8.5 makes Emacs unnecessary
Some of my favorite features in Plan 9 are you can enter multi-lined text using the Escape key, instead of sendmail's ^D or dot-on-a-single-line kluge. 8.5 is based around text, text can be selected with the mouse and copied into a /dev/snarf buffer.
If 8.5 takes off, it will definitely be a success.
Perhaps I'm naive here, but I don't see why you dismiss 3D as a GUI. You imply that serious graphics hardware is really necessary for 3D, but anymore, 3D support is standard, especially in the optimized forms such as Glide and Direct3D (I know, I'm a heretic for not promoting GL instead of these proprietary standards).
In playing with Silicon Graphics machines I was not overly impressed with their GUI design. It had only a few tiny improvements, such as enhanced graphical directory navigation at the command prompt and the scaling of just about everything. Anymore, the prompt is being phased out. Hell, even in Linux, the "task-bar" is replacing more and more everyday command-prompt operations with mindless point and click. And forget about the prompt in windows. Also it wasn't too long ago that DirectDraw allowed graphics scaling on the windows platform.
I've seen a couple interesting concepts utilizing 3D. The most profound (for me at least) was the perspective view. Namely for those of you, like me, that have window-itis (never less than 10 windows open at a time), only those windows in central view are fully sized and detailed, surrounding windows are visible though compressed / distorted (the actual method I think was to provide a geometrical box which you were looking into.. All non-selected windows were on the periphery of the box and thereby taking up less space).
Perhaps you are thinking more along the lines of the movie Disclosure where you make use of a virtual reality helm and gloves. Computationally, VR is no different than standard 3D games (first person with multiple complex input devices). The only real complexity with the Disclosure model was the voice interface (which required AI), and possibly the scanning device that renders your avatar.
VRML could have been the next big GUI, but it seems to have failed miserably, probably because it never found it's killer app. Theoretically we could have all mimicked our working environment, and then applied various database queries around certain triggers, and you could have achieved a low-res version of Disclosure.
I think Apple's integration of PDF into their GUI is definitely a step in the right direction, though as you said, it's nothing new (NextStep had postscript built-in in a similar fashion). Unfortunately that's really only for show, and doesn't really provide too much additional functionality.
Hell, the whole concept of the task bar is a remarkable advancement in my opinion. Anything that allows me to seamlessly manage multiple services on my computer (or to blend them into one big service) is advancement in the science. Additionally the treed directories that expand and collapse on command (with the ability to perform operations on the tree as if you were at a command prompt) is functional (though it has been around for well over a decade even in the DOS world a la Xtree Gold, etc). Intelligent Drag and Drop has been an essential addition to the GUI world (thankfully even the UNIX world is catching up on this respect). Recent advancements have been the utilization of html/xml to design dynamic GUIs. MS has been attempting to take this approach with their active desktop, though that seems to be too much fluff. Gnome, on the other hand, is doing a good job of using XML for this purpose.
I think a generic (and more importantly open) rastering device, such as PDF along with the dynamic window modeling of XML could revolutionize graphics, if for no other reason than to simplify the process, and thereby open up GUI development to even non programmers (just look at how many web pages are maintained by clueless computer users). With the ever-growing complexity of new software, it is most important to device tools that simplify the development process which intern could attract people from other disciplines.
-Michael
I think good ground for GUI research is in games these days. Games have room to be artistic and to try new things that a mainstream OS can't get away with. There are many types of game GUIs/UIs and the data or whatnot that games interface with is very diverse as well. I was just discussing with friends how ingeniously Blizzards has put together UIs. Have you seen Diablo I? Have you seen Diablo II, and how the improved on Diablo I's interface, and the new features they have added to it to make the game easier to play? In Diablo II it's childs play to customize your two mouse buttons, even during tense situations, and it is necessary during gameplay to do so. With a couple clicks you completely change the way you interact with the program. There is even a fully customizable keyboard map so you can choose something with just a keystroke.
Starcraft, as well, I believe is ingeniously engineered. With only two mouse buttons and with maybe 50 unique 'units' to control, each with an average of 4 or 5 commands, the game is set so selecting a unit in the game and right clicking gives the unit an implicit command, and it depends on the situation. If you select a unit and right click on a space, he goes there. Right click on an enemy, you attack it; on a transport, you try and get inside it. Yet again, there are keybord shortcuts and buttons for about everything, with 'tooltip' help texts that tell you what a button does, with the keyboard shortcut highlighted. These help the situations that implicit commands don't cover.
What about other games? What do people think about the UI in Everquest, for example. It'd 3d, but it doesn't have to be as responsive and Quake3, and so works differently and has different commands, things it expects from the user. Modern games are the petrie dishes for UI, AI, and 3D programming, but people are only usually looking at the 3D part.
I believe that interfaces are moving beyond the standard GUI. Much research is now being done in cybernetitcs and other more holistic interface views. I think that the emphasis of research as a whole is turning to more than just the GUI, it's going to speach, motion, phone, web, device. The GUI has more life in it, and will continue to evolve, but in concert with all of these other interfaces. When you think about it, your pager is just another interface to a computer.
Eh...
This is basically the same conclusion I came to. Had to read pretty far down the page to find your post, but I figured that somebody had to have posted something like this by now. I was trying to think of what other sort of interface you could have when you're using a mouse and keyboard, but decided that what we've got is probably as good as any other interface designed to be used with a mouse, keyboard and monitor. Once we figure out a better way of communicating with our computers, we'll come up with a better GUI (assuming it would still be useful).
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Actually, M$ has done quite a bit of study in the area of UI usability.
/. search for OS X. A recent criticism of the Aqua interface mentions many UI considerations that Apple people completely ignored when Aqua was developed.
One particular conclusion I recall is that the UP and DOWN buttons on a scrollbar should be on the same side of a scrollbar. Sounds weird, but that's mental inertia: The reason for this is that clicking on these buttons moves the window content by a line, while clicking inside the scrollbar moves contents by a page... The finely grained movement, coupled with the very small target area of the UP and DOWN buttons tend to be difficult for users who need to alternate between these buttons often. Placing them close to each other makes for one precision/proximal movement only, not a macro-movement along the scrollbar and a proximal movement to hit the button.
This came out of M$'s Usability labs and is documented in an M$ Press book on UI design (forgot title). Of course when the M$ market drones got a hold of this idea, it mutated, and M$ products now have small PGUP and PGDN buttons on the bottom of the scrollbar, which is redundant since the scrollbar already provides these functions implicitly.
Another 'betterment' (which M$ 'extended' just to be different) is the NeXT (and other UNICES) convention of putting the scrollbar at the left side of the window, instead of the right. The reason for this is that most languages are read from left to right, and the beginning of a line of text provides more information (lists etc) than the end of a line. Sliding the window off-screen to the right, to make space on the desktop, would be more usabe is you could still scroll, and still read the beginning of the lines of text contained in the window - hence, the scrollbar should be on the left, not right edge of the window. A similar case may be made for placing the horizontal scrollbar at the top of the text area instead of at the bottom.
Much research is being done on UI conventions. So much so in fact, that the EU (European Union) has a Standards Document for UI designers that all companies selling software (in certain areas of software, i.e. safety and fiscal) need to comply with for reasons of non-ambiguity and legal responsibility. A friend in Germany will be forwarding this doc to me, and I'll make it web-available as soon as I receive it.
The doc outlines things such as standard wording that is easily translated between languages, standard button layouts, the upper-bound for the number of controlls that should/may appear in a single interface container (dialog box etc), standard icons that appear on pop-up dialogs, color schemes... I'll know more after I actually read it.
In the mean time, do a
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Check out the User Interface group which is part of the numerous research groups at Microsoft.
There are many universities such as MIT, Georgia Tech, and CMU which do user interface research, but studies (conducted at CMU) have shown that it takes a long time for advances done in universties to reach actual products.
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
"Computers are nothing but a perfect illusion of order" -- Iggy Pop
Small devices like PDAs, cell phones, wrist watches, alpha two-way pagers, etc. seem to provide a fair amount of challenge and possible room for creativity with 6x6 icons and drop-down menus that take up most of the screen.
--
It depends on what you mean by GUI research. There is a lot of bullshit "lets copy the Mac and call it GUI research" at your lower quality schools (and industry). Frequently, "themability" or simmilar crap gets passed off as GUI research. I think your better places are working on real stuff though (i.e. not fluf like themes).
Plan9's GUI applications have a lot of inovative ideas like: use cut and paste for menus instead of plldowns (pulldowns are crap), make dialog boxes appear on the side of the screan where they will not interupt the person who is really doing something (traditional dialog boxes are a dumb idea too). Anywho, it's pretty cool ideas with real research to back them up (unlike 99% of "GUI Research"). I'm shure the good school's like MIT have one or two people with even more brilliant ideas.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I've seen an interesting GUI. You press this button, and it cleans my clothes. This has something to do with the fact that this computer controls a washing machine. The user interface to that never changed.
The windowing GUI is desinged for the applications that it was designed for. It still serves it purpose. No more changes are needed.
New innovation will come when a new use is found for computers that the desktop metaphor doesn't fit.
Xerox Alto and Xerox Smalltalk from the mid-1970s
had some nice features that never made it into their commercials successors such as the Lisa, Mac, Motif, NeXT or Windows. These ran on CPU speeds in hundreds of thousands operations per second or 3-4 magnitudes slower than now.
The wacky world of depth. I still think a concept that is going to see its time come eventually is the 3d interface. Someone has already mentioned psDoom and the Doom System Administration Tool. At the time when the Doom SysAdmin program was on ./ for the first time, someone mentioned that humans have a much better spacial memory than they do for abstract data like text or numbers. I don't remember the number for the pizza guy, but I never forget that the phone book sits next to the phone. We're used to reasoning with relation to spacial objects, knowing what sort of things should be where. A 3d interface doesn't require the sort of complex "jack in your nervous system" schlock that always emerges from Cyberpunk novels; for a lot of people, something like Doom would be good enough. Just post some signs on a wall or something. Moving from room to room in a building is intuitive; it's something we do every day of our lives, from a very young age. A 3d interface takes advantage of our natural inclination to use sight as our primary sense. Figuring out the 'theme' of a room or a location is much easier for most people than figuring out and recalling something abstract, like what files end up in what directory. It's worth some research, I think, and I hope people continue to look into it.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Some months ago I wrote up a design (not quite complete) for a Visual Shell Interface (VSI). Essentially, it allows for assembling of shell commands with pipes and redirection by means of icons representing them. When you select one of the icons, all its options appear like a properties dialog. Piping and redirection, however, are represented visually. The man page is also made available and you can create tools from these small tools either by drag 'n drop methods which creates the actual text representation on a line at the bottom of the windows--or vice-versa. I think KParts is an excellent innovation as well. And QT's mechanism for signals and slots also would fit this philosophy quite well. KParts--it is my understanding--allows you to basically drag 'n drop whole applications into a sigle window where each takes over the menu and status bar when it has the focus. I truelly believe that a UNIX desktop can be tremendously more powerful than Windows not by new inventions so much as by simply finding ways to implement the good old console capabilities in a GUI way. Being able to put componants together and saving the configuration of the Window is like codeless development of specialized applications. --Matthew C. Tedder matthew@tedder.com
So, no, GUI research ain't dead. ("It's pining for the fjords."
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
There are some great innovation going on when it comes to user interface design. I work as a researcher in sweden and here a lot of people are working on new hand healed devises and how to make new user interfaces for small screens(mostly because Ericson and Nokia are nordic, two of the leading cell phone manufacturers in the world). So a lot is happening in that area.
A god place to look for innovation is ACM chi (computer human interaction), a org where you can find a lot of fun stuff. A lot of the research that is going on is about how to integrate computers in to our life's, so that you don't need to interact whit them directly, they them self should be context sensitive to their environment and respond to your needs and filter out the information you need. this is usually called "augmented reality"
So what about regular user interfaces? well in my opinion there is way to little innovation when it comes to computer applications and the open source community has not been as innovative as one would think, but i what to give one link to Alias|Wavefront. If you look at there hi-end cad/animation software you will find so much of innovation that will make you hate most of our common software's interfaces
Eskil
First real GUI I could buy for home. Subsequent GUIs have evolutionary versus the jump from text to Mac. The Mac I got excited about, while modestly interested in successors.
This was a few years ago, but I remember seeing some protoype GUI's done by a couple grad students at the University of Waterloo.
One of the big changes they had made was to use circular menus, rather than the traditional pull down ones. When you right-clicked the mouse on the screen, a menu appeared around the pointer with wedge-shaped menu-items. The idea was that with pull-down menus you always had to scroll down a long way to get to some of the useful commands (like "Exit"). With the circular menu, you eliminate the inequality.
The team was also working on some other projects like trying to display network traffic in a meaningful way. As I said, this was a few years ago, so I don't know what's become of it.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Alias Wavefronts Maya uses pie menus and is just
great. Its the reason I switched and
The interface just "flows" when you use it.
I just love it.. oh well.. back to modeling
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
The wide use of 3D first-person games shows that we DO have the powerful graphics engines needed to run immersive virtual 3D environments.
What we don't have (or at least haven't shown) is the insight to create something more effective than time-consuming walk-thru paradigms.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Here's a favorite of mine: Calm Technology (1995). A dangling string as 'gui' for network traffic. And a big recent gui improvement: the scrolling mouse. Not a huge thing, but yeah! That makes sense. We need to be ambitious about these things. Remember, it's supposed to be fun.
When I was in the Industrial Design program at the University of Illinois, I had the opportunity to meet a travelling professor who had been doing some (then) cutting-edge work for IBM and several other information systems companies.
He told us about a lot of conceptual projects that were being batted around the industry, and among them was an extremely interesting project involving a new pressure-sensitive polymer. This polymer, upon stimulation by pressure or heat, could be made to change color immediately and precisely. A sheet of it could be stimulated to function as a display, with relatively crisp results.
But here's the cool (and on-topic) part: Being a polymer sheet, it could be easily thermoformed similar to other sheet thermoplastics, allowing it to take many shapes other than a flat screen and still retain it's ability to display pixels on any part of itself.
This material would open the door to a possible revolution in GUI's - It would immediately remove the bounding box of a X-inches by Y-inches flat screen, and allow for some really innovative hardware (and software to go with it). Imagine a GUI based on a circular display. Or even a spherical one.
I wish I had more static information on the project; it was very conceptual at the time that he explained it to us, and I haven't heard anything about it since.
A lot of posters here make references to CHI (Computer-Human Interface) research groups at various universities. This just skims the surface. (Do a google search for "computer human interface" or "human computer interface" and follow any of the many links you'll find).
Is GUI innovation dead? Well, one of the things CHI people are working on are ways to improve GUI design. However, as is sadly too common, there is a huge barrier between what academics find and what is adopted in industry.
Remember: although Apple did do a *lot* of original work with GUIs, the core ideas came from academia (Even the Xerox PARC team were former students of Doug Englebart, the Stanford researcher who laid the important groundwork).
But where are the bold, new, designs? Why do all the improvemnts still look like dialog boxes and buttons?
Well, there may be hugely innovative stuff yet to be done - but the field is old by computer science standards. Most of the major ideas of how to get humans with keyboards and mice to interact with computers have already been done.
So does this mean *all* UI innovation is done? Nope. The old hardware assumptions - the human had a keyboard and mouse, the computer had a video display (and maybe a sound system) - will be overturned.
You will be able to use your eyes and hands to let the computer know what you want. Or, if that isn't accurate enough, you can still use the mouse. You can speak when that's more efficient, or type if typing would be faster (For things like "(" or "{" or "["). If your finger and eyes aren't accurate enough to point, go ahead and use the mouse.
All of these new ways of interacting with computers will lead to new ways of presenting data, and new ways of allowing users to modify data. The innovation won't be in GUIs alone, but a combination of GUIs with newer input/output devices.
Don't ask about innovation in GUI design, ask about innovation in human-computer interfaces overall.
The only truly new paradigm I've come across in a while is called lifestreams, which is based on the ideas of Yale's David Gelernter. It basically replaces the spatial metaphor, on which conventional "desktop"-type GUIs are based, with a chronological one. Interesting.
spawn_of_yog_sothoth
Check out "Morphic" for the Squeak JVM: www.squeak.org :)
It's supposedly the future of GUIs.
please!
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
There are lots of market reasons why a non-WIMP mainstream user interface is unlikey to emerge. Essentially, the WIMP interface works well enough for doing productivity-style applications with a screen, mouse, and keyboard.
Future interfaces will come when they are needed to support future capabilities. Look for new input/output technologies and new form-factors to usher in radical changes - speech input/output, vision, etc., will reshape the user experience in the next decade. In addition, expect that future user interfaces will have an increased recognition of the social and emotional functions that our computing devices are being asked to serve. (and no, I am not talking about Bob...)
- davevr
-====
Open Source Virtual World's Toolkit! ==> http://www.vworlds.org
I used to do something like this with win3.1. I would set the active window frame to green and the inactive window frames to red. Unfortunately when win 95 came out this didn't work out so well as too many other screen components were also deemed "active".
There were several posts before raising the question: "Do we need a new GUI?" thats a good question anyone trying to develop new GUI should ask.
I personally don't accept the claim we reached perfection. Even without introducing new input/output devices (which is also part of GUI research), there is always room for improvement. The question is: what do we need to improve. But one preliminary question is: why do we need a GUI?
GUI gives us a standard way to communicate with the computer. In a way, it is kind of a language. As such it needs to achieve two goals: One: it should provide a standard way to communicate with our applications. We need to learn one language to use the GUI, and not a different language for each application (kind of like learning new language in order to chat with each new person you meet). Second: be as efficient as possible. A GUI should not stand in the way of the user.
So, how do current GUI scores in those two areas?
It does seem as current GUI does provide a coherent way to communicate with all applications, which is fairly easy to learn, but it can improve in several aspects here:
1. Cover more aspects of the UI - some aspects are currently not covered by the GUI, that may be included.
2. Simpler/easier to learn GUI. You may wonder if it can get any easier than it is, yet for some people that never touched a computer it still looks rather complicated. I'm not sure simpler/minimalist=easier, though. What can be simpler than a VCR interface? Yet how many people would never learn how to program a VCR. Maybe easier means make it closer to the way we communicate with other people
3. Make it customizable - in other words, let the GUI adapt itself to you, instead of letting you adapt yourself to the GUI.
As for making the GUI efficient, there is a lot to achieve as well. We all know using keyboard shortcuts is a lot easier than using the GUI features. Can we improve here? Can we combine intuitiveness with efficientcy?
I don't think 3D GUI really address any of those questions. It looks neat, but thats it. Any other ideas? There could be. If you want to invent something new, just:
1. Be creative.
2. Forget anything you know about current GUIs
3. Think about easier communication, not about neat look.
It is amazing how many developers, including those of Aqua, neglect these basic principles in favor of pretty new designs that are ultimately more difficult to use than the previous - see, for example, their review of EntryPoint, the replacement for PointCast.
Give me my old Mac any day ... just without crashing so damn much.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
-Chris Tower
"Everything comes at a price and sooner or later, we all have to pay" -cTower
I'm tired of bombing the universe
Bash, Emacs, State of the Art RAD IDEs,
all know "Tab-Completion" and kind of Code Introspection.
Now, look at Round-Trip-Engineering Tool, like Rose, Together and the like.
You can already code thru UML GUIs, forceing yourself thinking oo (should be a plus for complex multi-programmer applications).
But I'm looking for a graphical tool, giving one a graph/map/net overview, for reengineering functional, deadline grown, spagetti code.
Should be like this:
Just select a startpoint, eg. a variable, getting centered, and different arrows around show to functions modifying it. clicking a function opens a new level, with all called fns, used params, etc.
Browse through the code in mindmap style!
Would do it myself, if I hadn't bought that resident evil 3.
---
I am a student at the University of Washington which is home to the Human Interface Technology Lab. Some of my colleages are doing some interesting new work. Gesture recognition is one thing we are working on. We have one application of gesture recognition that does finger tracking near a screen. We have a display of that that will be at SIGGRAPH 2000. PUI or perception user interface is not being done here but I am aware of it. That is where movement of the eye is interpreted as input. Augmented or Mixed reality is something new and interesting that brings the computing environment out into the real world. We are doing some really cool work there. You can chech our stuff out at www.hitl.washington.edu. -Jordan Andersen
One idea I saw kicking around for the Berlin project was quite similar to what you're saying... Since the whole windowing system would be vector-based, windows could pulse, or spin, or waggle, or do any number of things to get your attention. Colorblind people rejoice!
Wah!
In the "meat" world we already have concepts for most of things we want in a computer environment. We need to jack-in to the wetware that's already running, find the VBLANK signal, and update the visual space memory with only those items which we want to expect and utilize. The problem with current GUI's is that unlike the mind, where things are mostly out of the way until we need them, everything is in the way or obscured by the last thing, or buried deeper than government Black-ops projects by some popup panel shortcut crap.
If we slave a serious external component to the information requests within the mind for applications and information, then only those items need to be within visual space.
We'll get there. It may scare the shit out of the small-minded and near-sighted, but the more we hack the genome and eventually the wetware, the less we'll need mice, CRT's, and keyboards.
Now if we could only hack the governments and get them to stop using technology as a ratchet to continually restrict and control people we could start making real changes.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
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.
-----
Klactovedestene!
The OS/2 Workplace Shell had a nice, advanced GUI. Somewhere I have an IBM book (CUA?) that described the ideas and principles behind the new GUI. Everything was supposed to be document centered. If you needed a new spreadsheet, you dragged a new spreadsheet from a spreadsheet template icon to the desktop and then double clicked on it. You didn't directly run a spreadsheet program. Everything was an object and you could right-click for the object's methods and properties. Microsoft stole some of the elements of the GUI when they created Windows 95.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Let's face it, people still like to use their fingers when they work. Being able to handle paper, shuffling it around and giving it to someone, is still the way that is preferred to process information. The mouse -- and, to some extent, the keyboard -- divorce the hand from interacting from information on the screen. I would love to be able to touch my screen in order to interact with documents any day. If you haven't seen new people use a mouse, try it some time. They will look at the mouse, move it a little, check the pointer on the screen, look at the mouse and move it more, etc. I felt those kiosks at the mall with the touch-sensitive screens were more userfriendly than some of the junk I've put up with!
Getting back to the point, the idea of an interface needs to be fused at the hardware level before the software level will take off. Make the screen, keyboard and mouse one unit, kind of like in Star Trek. (Not those little terminals that sit on people's desks. I don't see how much usability can come out of those. I'm talking about those terminals the pilot/navigator use.) If anyone has read the StarTrek Technical Manual, you'll know what I mean. A touch-sensitive optical display that automatically re-arranges the controls so that the button you are most likely to use is closest to your hand when you need it.
But that's for another day.
Let's concentrate on the hardware right now and forget the software we have whose only purpose is to work-around dificiencies of a 30-yr old design.
Just for starters, Oberon V4 has:
- no overlapping windows
- chorded mouse actions
- no menus, or
..., all text is a menu - There is no concept of "shell"
- There are no interactive programs, all commands complete without user interaction
- The user interacts with documents, not programs.
- All commands can be applied to almost any document
- Commands are subroutines loaded into the system.
It is original, different, and I think it is very cool. There is also a more recent research project, called Oberon System 3 oddly enough, that adds a lot of other interface features and looks a little more "normal". It is especially interesting for its document model and its GUI building capabilities.You can find our more at: http://www.oberon.ethz.ch
There are lots of downloadable verions too:
- Linux version of V4: http://sport1.uibk.ac.at/tanis/oberon.linux.html
- Native PC (bare hardware) version of System 3: http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/native/
There are also versions for PPC, Sparc, HP, Windows, Mac, ARM, etc.Check it out.
-dg (dg@suse.com)
Something clicked while reading the AntiMac page.
The Trashcan/Recycle Bin metaphor should be extended. When you empty your trash can, the contents should be placed in Dumpster on your LAN. If you realize that you've deleted a file that you needed, you can go dumpster diving. Of course the LAN will have a twice weekly pickup, so if the garbage truck has already come, you'll have to travel to the Landfill (a tape/CD-RW archive of deleted files) to retreive your file.
Somehow, it seems kind of fitting to have a Dumpster icon appear in a Windows NT/2000 server window under Network Neighborhood, and a Landfill icon when you click on Entire Network.
We appear to have reached a point of diminishing returns in widget research. Most of the "new" ideas coming out now are just old ideas adapted to different shapes or sizes of real estate.
:-) Although, to be serious, this may be where the cutting edge is. Now that we've worked out the architectural and navigational features, in theory and (more or less) practice, it's time to let the user give everything an element of personal style. Granted, people can come up with some pretty ugly, hard-to-read, hard-to-navigate themes. But eventually, the cream rises to the top, and you can find themes that achieve a critical mass of style and substance.
.NET may be the ultimate evolution*. But I'm more interested in the intermediate steps that would be of more immediate value. Never mind .NET. Let's start building .DESK!
:-)
And of course, it's gotta be skinnable!
Where the action is right now is, IMHO, organizing personal information . It's the one thing "personal" computers have circled and circled around, without ever landing. There's projects and documents and appointments and to-do lists and contacts and deadlines and dates and bookmarks and playlists and news and sports and weather and stock portfolios and spreadsheets and pictures and savegames and bills and oil changes and e-this and mobile that and (gasp, gasp) they're all over the place! There's lots of objects, representing volumes of information, but very little glue to hold it all together in some form that one can quickly and easily manage.
That's where the next frontier is: Automating and organizing the seemingly infinite amount of stuff that orbits around us in our daily lives. We've spent years building up the parts of it all (office suites, PIMs, file managers, etc.). Now, we need to pull all that together in a way that allows the user to track it all, but also in a way that conforms to the user's ideas, skills, work habits, and goals. Not a simple task, or else we'd all be doing it now.
But we've made a start. If you look at portals, digital dashboards, and the occasional leaked screenshot of Microsoft prototypes, like Neptune and Whistler, you can see some of that come together. And Microsoft's blue-sky plans for
* After two name changes, and three versions for Microsoft to get it right.
Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
Facing down the future coming fast - Rush
This sig intentionally left blank.
First off, immersive 3D environments do not need a powerfull SGI. A GeForce2 is can push quite a few texture mapped polygons...
I do think that much more research needs to go into wearable computer interfaces, such as an augmented vision interface which is to overlay reality, this may become common place much sooner then many people expect, but as of right now, there would be almost no software support.
Until 3D displays are commonplace, whether they use 3D HUD technology, much improved visor displays or the latest of Mad Zacks YetToBeInvented Gizmos, GUIs will be 2D. Until they are 3D the next generation of development wont take place. In the absence of true 3D display theres no point in developing mass-market 3D pointing devices. In the absence of either of those components then theres nowhere a mainstream GUI can go from its current state. Sad but true.
# human firmware exploit
# Word will insert into your optic buffer
# without bounds checking
I had a
The most disturbing things about Liunx GUIs is that the architects--and I hesitate to call them that--are not paying attention to any research or good advice. There are a number of good books and online resources about GUI design, and many of them go off in very different directions than Windows. So, yes, there is research going on and there are alternatives, but no one is listening. "Gotta clone Windows!" is the battle cry.
Two good examples are the Genera environment from Symbolics and the system software of the Apple Newton. The latter of these is astounding. It does away with a filesystem, and is based on scraps of information that are indexed and compressed on the fly, invisible to the user. Lisp Machine fanatics can tell you about Genera.
The biggest flaw of KDE and GNOME is that they aren't designed to solve any particular problem. They're just nebulous environments with doodads and gadgets. KDE, for example, seems to have been developed solely to allow people to tinker with and customize KDE. And what a lot of effort and code has gone into a project without a real point.
It would be nice to have a GUI that was more fitting for the small and well-engineered Linux kernel. A 1970s terminal window misses the mark. So does a crufty, minimalist interface sitting on top of X Windows. Are there any real alternatives besides the jump to KDE and GNOME?
Grandma, intelligent and resourceful, can't use a mouse. A track ball may help, but even that will be shaky. Why? Muscular Atrophy, a form of muscular dystrophy. MA causes the body to wither away, no matter what the person does. Mouse clicking has become a maximal-effort event. When the mouse does click, it slides halfway across the screen due to the weight of her arm and the exertion that's required.
Grandpa, on the other hand, is still a pillar of physical strength. His eyes, however, have gone. Macular degeneration. He still has some vision, and when I take him flying he can see some using his special telescopic-autofocus glasses. Viewing detailed images, like computer monitors, is impossible, though.
The next wave of computer interfaces will involve a revolustion in multi-sensory, or at least non- visual, interaction. We're going there already with the limited abilities of Dragon's Naturally Speaking and IBM's ViaVoice (among others).
This new non-visual I/O systems will enhance the computer experience of those with physical disabilities, but the rest of us as well. I dream of the day when I can write small programs by verbally giving the computer a list of actions to perform. Or retrieve data by just asking for it.
In my head, and on all sorts of paper at home I have plans for these kinds of things. I'm sure that others do as well. Computer I/O systems should be able to adapt to use any sense that can convey the information-- visual, aural, and even tactile for perhaps Braille-readers (I don't think that smell or taste will help much :)
Just my view of the Road Ahead...
Jeff
PS-- just got my first Linux box going this weekend! I've got the best father in law in the world; with the kind donations from his closet, and some cheapy stuff from the local computer show, I got a K6-2 400 system for about $300! woohoo! It's RedHat 6.2
Where's all the time between 1984 and 2000?...(ok, 14 years in one sense, but still??)
What do you mean by that?
I was wondering if this happens to others, too: since some time (a month or so) I noticed that my karma would decrease by 4 and sometimes 6 points overnight. I could never track any of my posts moderated down. I went back to some 2 month old posts, but I coud find no evidence of negative moderation. I think something is fishy here.
Any comments?
Sigged!
Then came Apple. They cut corners to squeeze something that looked like the Xerox PARC GUIs into completely underpowered machines. First, they tried the Lisa, which was marginally acceptable, if already quite stripped down. Then came the 128k Mac and its toolbox. It was a great engineering achievement and a great hack. Microsoft then just copied Apple's strategy, coming out with a mediocre clone of a good hack. Apple's strategy worked beautifully in the market.
But squeezing all that stuff into these underpowered machines meant that customizability, ease of programming, and extensibility went out the window. X and UNIX contributed their part. The overall result has been 20 years of living within a straightjacket of limiting APIs, poor tools, and lousy languages. Since the consumer didn't have to deal with the programming side and since the results looked nice, the consumer was happy. But, IMO, Apple is probably the single most responsible company for impeding progress in the area of GUIs and HCI.
People will make progress in fields when they have good tools that allow them to explore new ideas easily. We are only now beginning to get back to the state of the art of the early 1980's. Languages like Java and Python make experimentation easier, and systems like OpenGL present a good standard for advanced graphics. Maybe soon, we'll see some genuine progress in human/computer interaction again.
1 a : disinclination to action or labor : INDOLENCE b : spiritual apathy and inactivity (the deadly sin of sloth)
diminishing returns
1 : a rate of yield that beyond a certain point fails to increase in proportion to additional investments of labor or capital
2 : benefits that beyond a certain point fail to increase in proportion to extended efforts
textbook (adj.)
: of, suggesting, or suitable to a textbook; especially : CLASSIC (a textbook example)
GUI
graphical user interface
: a computer program designed to allow a computer user to interact easily with the computer typically by using a mouse to make choices from menus or groups of icons
Gui
river 200 miles (322 kilometers) SE China in E Guangxi Zhuangzu flowing S into the Xi
Grammar nazis conclusions:
I agree 100% with C.Lee. Perhaps the GUI is headed in the direction of Gui.
Keeping
I think I have an idea for a new poll:
This Trashcan idea is:
a)original
b)retarded
c)the dumbest thing I've ever heard of
d)dumber than the dumbest thing ever
e)a microsoft innovation, right?
I guess I'm being rude there. It's a pretty original idea. Cudo's for that!
Oops, I assumed that by entering a blank line, I would get a paragraph break. I've gone back and reformatted this message in the next posting. Sorry! Is there a way to delete this badly formatted one, or could somebody please do that for me? I pressed "Change" and nothing happened. The page came back the same with not editing fields, alas.
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Check out The Flash Challenge.
It is a monthly contest of web sites that predominantly use flash.
The interfaces on many of these web sites are not run-of-the-mill and most are truly inspirational.
GUI's have become so similar that there are few real differences between them and they all work in the same way. Why? Because they receive input from a mouse and users point and click with it. Yes there are cosmetic differences between them but they all have the 'click on this icon to run this program'. Even with unorthodox ones like WindowMaker you still have to move your mouse then click to make something happen. As long as we use the mouse the GUI will not change.
This "model" has become fairly much dominant, and continues to undergo various forms of "tweaking," lately with everyone going gonzo over Themes.
Unfortunately, major changes require either nuking the whole thing and starting from scratch, which is a lot of work, or else making systems of more and more byzantine complexity to operate.
The latter is where adding additional "stuff-to-click" takes us. Every added toolbar results in another "hieroglyphic" language, moving us towards ancient Egyptian rather than anything modern. (The McLuhan "Laws of Media" strike again...)
The more "intelligent" sorts of changes don't necessarily involve increasing the visible complexity, but rather trying to split systems more clearly into this paradigm of designing, somewhat separately, an underlying model, a set of controller functions to control the object, and then some form of "front end," or "view."
It's hardly new; Smalltalk and NeXTStep promoted the MVC "view of the world" umpteen years ago, and the problem really is that the ad-hoc GUI construction systems have so often conflated M, V, and C together that many GUI applications wind up as jumbled sets of functionality.
It may be that introducing things like Glade User Interface Builder along with libglade , to encourage keeping "controller" stuff in once place, GNOME-print, Gnome Canvas, DPS for XFree86, and Display Ghostscript, ReportLab, providing "view" tools, and CORBA, providing separation of "model," may provide a direction to clearly separate these functions so that GUIs will be less confused.
None of this represents dramatic, overnight change, and I'm not sure that that's a bad thing.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
What has changed such that we need a new UI? Computers still work the way they have for thirty or forty years, the problems are the same, the 2-D output is the same, the challenge is the same: make this box which can't read my mind, understand my speech, or think like a human churn through some work for me. Everyone has accepted Apple's HIG book more or less as a common language (Eazel more, OS X less, Windows just skimmed the book for the pictures). You can't just invent a UI; you've got to have a big new problem to solve. Something bigger than "how can I get a PhD out of this".
For instance, there's work being done on modelling user interfaces, so that they can be quantitatively evaluated before they have been built. There's also quite a lot of work to do to make use of the research that has been done, both for computers and other electronic devices. Anybody that compares, say, an Ericsson with a Nokia mobile phone will know that adoption of good user-interface technology isn't universal yet :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The current metaphor system of user interfaces is the best chance at this time to develop 3D interfaces. Almost anyone who plays first person shooter-type games is satisfied with the keyboard-mouse combination that is currently used. It works because the interface is simple.
., respectively. You would have to use the left hand, so accessing + and enter would be a stretch with your thumb, but you would be able to get used to it easily.
Imagine yourself in a 3D environment that extends indefinitely. Imagine 3 axes that all intersect at you. The X axis will point infinitely side to side, while the Y axis will point infinitely up and down. The Z axis points infinitely forward and backward. A satisfying 3D interface must find a way to rotate along each of these axes and move forward and backward among these axes.
For using the features of the computer, tasks must still be organized in a certain matter. Windows, dialog boxes, et cetera can still serve this purpose, with their content either rendered as a flat 2D surface on the window itself or they can "pop out" of the window - with "depth" values that make them come of the window. These depth values should be kept small, however because the farther the objects are from their "window," the more chaos and disorganization occurs.
The way that the keyboard+mouse combination works currently is that the mouse is mapped to rotate along the X and Y axes - moving the mouse left will rotate your perspective left around the Y axis and inversely for right, and moving your mouse up will rotate your perspective up around the X axis and inversely for down. You can use the keyboard in this system to move forward and backward along the X and Z axes, and limitedly along the Y axis - you can jump up, and gravity pulls you down, but there isn't the need for a good amount of control in that respect. A typical layout of keys for this approach is E moving forward along the Z axis, D moving backward, and S moving left along the X axis and F moving right.
We already have rotation along the X and Y axes, and movement along the X and Z axes... the movement system along the Y axis is much to weak to be used as a method of navigating through a GUI. What needs to be added to the system is a way to rotate around the Z axis, and a better system of moving along the Y axis. What would be ideal would be a mouse that has buttons on it that would serve as arrow keys arranged in the familiar format, but there isn't really a big market for that. Supply and demand therefore dictates a mouse like that will not be created for at least a couple of years.
We have to use different fingers on the keyboard, or assign more keys to the already in use fingers. We are using the ring finger for left movement along the X axis with the S key; the middle finger controls up and down movement on the Z axis with respectively the E and D keys; and finally the pointer finger moves right along the X axis with the F key. We can map the W key for use by the ring finger to rotation left around the Z axis, and for rotation right, we can map the pointer finger's R key. We can assign movement along the Y axis to the pinky finger. Q can move up and A can move down.
Using this system you can achieve somewhat accurate 3D precision with physical 2D input and output. To move a window or rotate it through the 3D environment, you can do just as you do in a 2D GUI. You hold down the left mouse button to "grab" a portion of the window - like the title bar, and navigate through the user interface, finally letting go of the left mouse button and dropping it where you want it. This presents a problem; it would be hard to select something if you don't have some way to pinpoint where you are "grabbing." A simple targeting reticule, like in FPS games, or guns, a dot, or a circle surrounding the current area pointed at would serve a great purpose. You just grab, rotate, move and drop and there, you've changed the location and rotation to where you want. Resizing windows should be limited from rotation, as that would shear the window and greatly complicate the whole interface.
If you were to modify the contents of a document, you must be able to easily rotate yourself so you are centered in relation to that window. You could simply select the window, press spacebar, and the GUI would automatically align you with the window, "looking" perpendicular to the surface of the window, and aligned so that your Y axis is aligned parallel to the left and right sides of the window.
Now that you are ready to work with your document inside the window, such as the text document, you start typing. However, you now realize that every time you press A, D, E, F, Q, R, S, W, or the spacebar, you manipulate the environment, but not the document. There must be a better way.
The most natural place to look on the keyboard to manipulate the environment with more than 4 keys would be the numeric keypad. You can press numlock to toggle between number mode and manipulation mode. As an added feature, when you are in number mode with the keyboard, the interface can be manipulated as a regular 2D environment, with a traditional cursor and everything! Key assignments could be replacing the keys E, D, S, F, Q, A, W, R, and spacebar with 8, 5, 4, 6, +, Enter, 7, 9, and
This is my wishlist; what actually happens to become a new interface will probably be radically different, but I hope I can provoke such an interface to be designed.
----
Sig, meet "end user."
>If I were to tell you to go into my car, on the front seat, look for the jewel case with the
;-)
>sexpot on the front, and bring it to me, how many "normal" people would be able to find it
>as compared to telling someone to find it on my computer.
But then again, who wants to have to click between cushions on pictures of couches every time you want to hit "play" in Quicktime/RealPlayer/WMP?
vasi
"Hey, who took the cork off my lunch?" -- W. C. Fields
My mp3 files are on portman@grits:/home/ender/music/mp3s/annoyingmusi
There is absolutly no standard when it comes to unix programs. Every programmer has to come up with their own strange syntax. Think about it, we have vi, emacs and all the other editors. Everyone has to memorize different switches for each program and none of them have much of any relation. I know there are loose standards but still, sometimes -v displays version, sometimes verbose. -h might get you help, -help or --help. Then you have to memorize each programs UI and strange config file syntax. Part of this makes unix great, a lot of it sucks. Just thnink how many different syntax's there are for configuration files. No wonder every new linux user is confused.
As far as GUI's go, most suck. I have to say windows is by far the easiest to use at first. Enlightenment looks nice and all but its confusing as hell to configure. Ever try to configure it by hand, wtf kind of syntax did they use. And besides, I would rather see some standards to computers rather than just another new geek interface that is totally original. There needs to be a consistent simple standard for people to follow that should carry over to all programs. Every UI in unix is like a whole different world, I wonder how much time people waste adjusting to each one?
Here's an idea for a GUI interface. I have to warn you in advance though, it feels a bit unworthy (and probably a bit unstructured too since I just came up with the idea).
A metaphor which I think might ease the use of computers (and which I haven't seen anywhere else yet) for ordinary people is that of a TV. In particular the remote control is usefull, but so is the channel concept.
Channels:
Each channel is a category of programs (eg Internet apps, office apps, image processing, games). You can associate programs with any channel of your own choice, or they can associate themeselves upon installation. You can have any number of channels open at the same time, though it'll turn out impractical at some level - at least until all of the walls in your house are screens. If only one channel is open, it'll open up fullscreen and launch one or more preset apps when turned on. There ought to be a set of standard channels (for software to count on to exist), as well as the possibility to create your own custom channels. A suite of programs (eg an office suite) might also create a custom channel at installation time. When a channel is closed, all data created in it is saved unless the user explicitly trashes it. A channel may also be minimized, in order for another channel to get all of the screen for a while. For programs, a channel is identified primarily by it's name though for the user it'll probably be easier to use it's shortcut - the channel number.
Remote:
The remote could either be a virtual remote on the screen complemented with a pointing device (eg a mouse, and perhaps using the numerical keypad for channel selecting if the user so choose), or a real one (which in that case could be a pointing device itself, I guess it would work like those guns one can attach to consoles). It would let the user choose a channel, activate associated apps, do all of today's point/click/grab/drag stuff. Apps should provide the user with easy ways to find the files which they can process (at least if the user has the rights to them) by interacting with some kind of file browser. Of course power users should be provided with ways to do what they like, but simple things should be made easy for the simpletons. If the remote is of the virtual kind, there should be a key/key-combo that makes it dis-/reappear. Most things should be doable with the remote only, though of course a keyboard will always give a user tons of more power.
One of the benefits of a scheme like this is that it would make it a lot easier for newbies to use. After all; who doesn't understand about a TV remote? Another benefit is that, at least as far as I can see, it doesn't take more than a window manager to provide these features within X today. Well, that and hardware support for the remote control...
Yes, I am a biological organism. All rumors to the contrary are just that, rumors.
FWIW, there's the IReX theme for Enlightenment.
wtf kinda idiot moderator did this!? (score:0 flamebait)? my comment is on topic, correct, insightful and funny. That really is how the new Apple mouse works. The interface from eXsistenz really is supposed to be obscene. gah! get with the program!
This includes:
- The whole "registry" thing.
- Similarly, when applications 'talk to one another,' whether via OLE, COM, CORBA, RPC, HTTP, or ICE, this has rather a lot of effect on system behaviour, even when the protocols hide "below the skin."
- The use of serialized data transfer protocols ( e.g. - the "Save File" dialog) as opposed to persistent database schemes similarly can make systems work way different even though the appearance of what gets shown on screen may have minimal difference.
These three "views" all have in common that they have nothing to do with which GUI library you're using to build your applications, or what icons are used.There is various information that needs to be persistent to one degree or another. On Windows, this tends to be saved in the Registry of "renoun and much denigration."
On Linux, such data typically sits in the hordes of files in /etc and in $HOME/.*rc
The semantics of how this all works has rather a lot of effect on how applications start up, even though it sits "under the covers."
It's a small additional step to get to "transactional" systems, where once updates are "committed," they are really permanent. Think Tuxedo/Encina...
The fact that they're not particularly "visible" does not make them any the less important in the overall scheme of things.
After all, if the gentle user can shut down (perhaps pressing the power switch!), and expect to power up again tomorrow and have everything go to where it was when they pressed the switch, that has lots of effect on user behaviour, whether they "click on save" continually, or not.
My thought here is that a lot of the "HCI" changes taking place don't always need to involve things that are manifestly graphical. A Massively Improved World may "simply" involve systems that are reliable and provide persistent data as opposed to "3D Rotating Splash Screens."
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I am certainly no expert on GUIs as I tend to stay in the deep server-side. But something that is percolating in my brain is that current GUIs are seriously retarded by being tied to a mouse. It is basically point at a single thing or select it and do something to it. It seems to me that better might start with all screens being touch screens. The next step would include being able to touch-pick-chord multiple things at once instead of one at a time. Opening up full touch modality should make more options available to the folks designing human/computer interface.
Another wacky idea is to have some kind of sensors around a screen that pick up user body movements quite accurately. So I could do things on the computer without seemingly touching any input device. Always did tend to hand-waving when it was time to get things done.
Who needs keyboards and mice? Have virtual keyboards on screen or in the air and select/ manipulate things directly on screen or in the air. Get at least some of the computer gear out of the way. And of course such virtual interfaces lend themselves much more easily to wearables.
Here is the guts of the patent from the detailed patent description
Pie menus are not patented. What is patented is a way large (greater than 8) options can be selected with nested pies and the overflows handled by linear selection.
The title of the patent helps: Methods and system of controlling menus with radial and linear portions
As I read it it is the combination that is patented.
IMHO of course.
I believe that the next step in UI evoluation will have to happen by removing the graphics part of it.
To tell the computer what we want it to do, we use the input devices given. Type some commands. Navigate a menu. Click and icon. This is all done to tell the computer what we have in mind for it to do. Humans don't interact with each other in this manner, but given the restrictions of the hardward on a computer we are forced into this slightly alien modes of communication.
So to add new UI methodology, we need to have new devices that allow us to interface with computers and new devices to give us feedback. The goal should be to drive technology to interact more on our level instead of making us interact with computers on their.
Voice Recognition will be important in this respect. People covey tasks to each other by spoken commands. Computer should be no different.
Sight Recognition will be important too. If the computer knew what you were looking at, it may figure out what you want it to do.
Immersive 3D Enviroments also could be important. Instead of coding instructions for a computer, why not show them what you want them to do by letting them watch your actions? This could be very important for robots that assemble something.
The flip side to this is that although if you have to do anything more than "computer, add this stuff up" then you'll find it hard to express that in human terms(language, motion, etc). Just think about how hard it would be express in human language terms every piece of data flow that could be in a server side database program(like Slashdot)! It could be that keyboards and mice are going to be hanging around with us for quite awhile regardless of what advances in hardware come along.
Yes, there are people still working on GUI designs. In fact, the best example of this can be found in Squeak v2.8 which now supports at least 5 different built in GUI's plus wrappers to windows widgets and some limited support to Tk widgets.
* The devfs that cannot be told is not the true devfs *
the mousewheel eliminates scroll buttons entirely
.oO0Oo.
this is the single greatest improvement i have seen in 5 years
force feedback mouse next
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
MacOS 1-9 all put text under their icons in every piece of Apple software I've seen. The OS X dock, however, is indeed nasty. I hope Apple rethinks it somewhat... //rp
I wish I had some moderator points. That was a fantastic refernce. Thank you!
I'm red green colorblind. I am actually a little worse in one eye than the other... these leads to some head splitting experiences when reading green text on a red background.
I've never met any other r/g colorblind person who could not see the difference between the colors on a traffic light. I think that you would probably have to be completely colorblind to not see the difference (location aside).
fyi I believe there is also a yellow/blue colorblindness but I've never seen this.
If you think there's anything worthwile going on at MicroSquish's UI group.
That "task gallery" thing comes right out of games from the early 80's.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Here's something to work on for all you GUI designers...
There needs to be a GUI version of the Linux | (pipe) command, to set up a pipeline of data from one application to another.
There are various cumbersome ways to almost do this, from copy-to-clipboard-and-paste, to the Windows right-click "Send To" feature, to Windows drag-and-drop, to OLE, but they aren't good enough.
If only I could automate copy and paste -- something like this:
Wouldn't that be cool? If you create it, be sure and send me royalty checks ;-)
A feature like this needs a good buzzword... how about Active Clipboard? It's really just a fancy, automated copy-and-paste with a GUI!
After all, he fact that you think Quick sucks and you cannot afford Office 2000 is because you believe that you cannot. We think we cannot afford many things, yet we still buy things we do not need. Advertising! (mmmm, need soda. why the heck should you buy sugar water?)
It is interesting, what the brains at MS are thinking of. Their big thing right now is the "Task Gallery", and from the initial screenshot I thought they might be on to something as big and exciting as Bob was...
Anyways, while it does add a new dimension to UIs, I can't say it's completely original. Basically it's a big room you travel through like DOOM, and many 2-d windows are thrown up all over the room, which look much the same as he windows we have now.
<rant>
Great...now I've got a third dimension to lose my open windows in. Right now, I can organise my computer crap in nice tree-like directories or in relational databases, and I have a small, humble 2-d screen to show my applications on where they can't get lost. In the real world, I print hard copy, and it gets mixed in with the bills, junk mail, magazines and newspapers stuffed in drawers or on piles on my desk--it's much easier to lose.
Now technology is making it easier for me to replicate this on my computer with 3-d UIs! Imagine this combined with the reliability of Linux: My computer was up for 96 days before I powered down for a hardware upgrade. In that time, I might clutter my 3-d realm (and my system resources) with dozens of forgotten open browser windows pointing to various SI swimsuit model pics I was analysing before being distracted by something else.
Now where did I put that spreadsheet--damn, I threw that browser window on top of it! What this place needs is a good taskbar or other list of running processes. But wait...didn't my old 2-d setup have that to?
I think a lot of effort is being misdirected into making flashy looking UIs. A UI should certainly look nice, but what do 3-d, "skinnable" apps, giant icons and superfluous animation add to the usability of computer technology? Sure it is a closer analogue to the real world, but who says that's the best? Humans developed written language which is far more practical to convey LARGE quantities of information than more "natural looking" pictures (Imagine War and Peace expressed as a series of icons). Icons are great for conveying a small message--"Click me! I activate your word processor!". For most people that works well. Why change it? We haven't fundamentally changed the wheel for a long time, after all...
</rant>
Anyways, I think the most exciting and valuable UI research in UI's won't be re-inventing the desktop. The future lies in completely different areas--particularly in addessing the needs of the disabled and in new ways to use computers in differnet environments. How about voice recognition and audio output (or maybe an interface driven by touch) for the blind? Or maybe something way out there like using bioelectric sensors in a headband so you could "think" at your computer by twitching your eyebrows (sounds ridiculous but it would be a valuable tool for someone like Stephen Hawking, who has lost most of his motor control but still has a lot of valuable things to say). Also, more thought has to be put into UIs for mobile devices--so far PalmOS is the leader there...
Just some thoughts...
You're using the most fertile environment for new GUI's right now; the web. Rather than everyone using the interfaces developed by a handful of designers at Microsoft, Apple or various universities, now every web site is essentially a new GUI. Sure, almost all are crap, but there is also some truly innovative work being done with Flash and DHTML.
What fools boredom breeds.
Also, coders of apps where the user tries to get into a rhythm and work quickly ( like desktop environments, GIMP, Starcraft...) should get over to doxpara and check out Associative Key Arrays. They're cool.
I don't think any of the new GUI stuff we're seeing with OS X (for example) takes advantage of the processor power of modern machines in new ways. So what if it's transparent and jiggly!! I want to be able to see more and work faster!
//rp
I have a feeling that once everybody has a high speed connection to the internet, the 3D people will rule. Everything will be as graphic intensive as we can only imagine, and we will need people that can provide it.
Disney will only be able to hold onto them for son long...
My advice? Never go to a 3D movie using red/green stereoscopy.
It exists, but it is very very rare.
---
Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
Burris
A mouse with force-feedback, like the Playstation Dual Shock controllers. A hard "bump" when you hit the edge of the screen, perhaps, and maybe a light "buzz" when you try to click on something you can't.
---
Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
Yeah, and if you're going to write a GUI pipe, write a GUI RegEx. I want to drag and drop iconic representations of the various RegEx pattern elements *!$^ to string together my expression.
I also to feed someone else's incomprehensible RegEx into the parser and have it visualise the thing for me.
Make the difficult things easy.
//rp
"Hey Mom, close the window its cold in here"
Well shit, there goes your school report you've been working on for the past week.
Voice activation and typing sounds cool, but in actual use its lame.
Sorry to respond to flaimbait like this, but I can't stop myself...
:-)
Windows' UI doesn't totally suck, any more than the Mac UI is totally the best possible in the universe. Both have strengths and weaknesses, some of which are purely religious in nature.
And let's face it, lots of real UI "refinements" (I hesitate to call them innovations) have occured on the Windows platform (not all started or endorsed by MS) compared to the Mac. I mean, in the last ten years, how many UI changes have been driven by the Mac? Sure, some... is the Mac really a driving force for change? I think it is quite the opposite, in fact...
MS has updated the basic Windows UI several times... first with Win95, then again with ActiveDesktop, and Win2K includes further refinements. Some are steps forward, some are steps back, but at least they're steps!
So I think that claiming that MS sees no reason to change the UI is not very well founded. If you don't believe it is good, that's one thing, but it's not arbitrarily static -- that distinction belongs far more to Apple, historically (of course, starting off with a better UI means they didn't have to 'hunt in the dark' as much, but still, you get my point).
I like the tool-tips and context menus that evolved on Windows (due to weaknesses in the huge 'button panels' that sprung up, though I admit I do sometimes prefer those tool palettes to selecting from menus for some applications, and I really appreciate having the *choice*). I like the use of tree-view organizations for many applications (though I admit they're hardly intuitive for most newbies, they're very much so for me). I like having the 'back button' in my computer environment as well as on my browser.
The web represents a definite change in UI. I think more are coming as displays get larger, flatter, cheaper, and higher-resolution... and as bandwith ceases to become a huge bottle-neck. And while Apple (especially Aqua) will be on the vanguard of some of those UI changes, Windows will be as well. Frankly, I think there's a lot to DISlike in Aqua (three little dots below a dock icon means it's running? Huh?), but there's also an awful lot to like (including its "pretty face"). However, there are some things that just seem like steps backwards in usability for more complicated tasks, or for more advanced users.
A good UI has to accomodate both newbies AND experienced/advanced users, and be flexible to 'work like' each individual thinks, rather than trying to force every user to think the same.
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Some of the subjects will ring like a bell to a lot of geeks around here. The way he lays it out is very lego-like (block by block). One of the best parts is the exploration of measuring the acutal ''efficiency'' of an interface -- finally you can say to the ''designer'' that there is more to UI design than ''personal taste'', rather you can determine the actual ''information efficiency'' of an UI. Works great in meetings and makes you seem like a rocket scientist!
Check it out:
http://www.jefraskin.com/
Summary of The Humane Interface Part I: PROBLEMS WITH THE GUIs WE HAVE Part II: WHAT INTERFACES SHOULD HAVE
TOC Highlights: Chapter Two: Cognetics and the Locus of Attention
2-1 Ergonomics and Cognetics: What We Can and Cannot Do
2-2 Cognitive Conscious and Cognitive Unconscious
2-3 Locus of Attention
2-3-1 Formation of Habits
2-3-2 Execution of Simultaneous Tasks
2-3-3 Singularity of the Locus of Attention
2-3-4 Origins of the Locus of Attention
2-3-5 Exploitation of the Single Locus of Attention
2-3-6 Resumption of Interrupted Work
Chapter Four: Quantification
4-1 Quantitative Analyses of Interfaces
4-2 GOMS Keystroke-Level Model
4-2-1 Interface Timings
4-2-2 GOMS Calculations
4-2-3 GOMS Calculation Examples
4-3 Measurement of Interface Efficiency
4-3-1 Efficiency of Hal's Interfaces
4-3-2 Other Solutions for Hal's Interface
4-4 Fitts' Law and Hick's Law
4-4-1 Fitts' Law
4-4-2 Hick's Law
Oliver's Law: Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
I think there's a hack or a virus or maybe just some corruption.
That's OK for me, I just run Netscape under Gnome from my Linux partition. Get real good network performace.
But when my poor fiance has to use my machine for web browsing, it nearly drives her to hysterics. She's learned how to use Windows and anything different really disturbs her.
Now, you could say "just get used to it and she'll be happy" but I think there are some real serious UI errors in Gnome that will affect its acceptance among people who are not expert users.
Chief among these is the way it switches desktops when you move the mouse off the screen. That really threw her and cause me trouble still. I don't think it should be possible to switch desktops by moving the mouse. I like the way it is done in the BeOS, where you hit a key combo (like switching virtual consoles when you're not running X) or clicking on a window that gives a menu of desktops.
But throwing the whole screen display sideways just because the mouse drifted a little is unforgiveable.
The other problem is that a default installation of Gnome with enlightment clutters up the screen with zillions of little icons. I mostly ignore these except when I have to fish under them to press on a taskbar button in Gnome 1.2. My fiance wanted to know how to get rid of them and I couldn't tell her - she wanted to view a web page full screen so there'd be a maximum view and you couldn't accidentally bring the focus to the wrong window.
While I think Gnome has the stated purpose of making Linux easier to use, I think it is having the opposite effect. I think it is worthwhile to have advanced features that are not installed by default but the default behaviour should be something that a novice can use.
You don't have to make it look like windows - get someone who's never used windows or macos before (hard to find these days, but there are some), sit them down in front of your linux box and videotape them working with the system.
Do these for your individual applications too.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Unfortunately, when SGI finally runs out of money and Microsoft buys them up, their patent portfolio will be in Bill Gates' hands.
Microsoft Corp. has a history of licensing certain patents (e.g. the one on FAT32) to all comers under these terms (IANAL and TINAQ): You license us all your patents; we'll license you these. (The USB group follows the same policy.) I expect that The Windows Company (a spinoff from MS) will follow the same procedure.
Will I retire or break 10K?
As other posters have commented, a pop-up piemenu of up to eight choices can be navigated with a quick flick of the wrist.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've got a friend who is r/g and purple/pink/blue color-blind... mostly a function of the red. The pink cups in the dining hall... well, he still claims those are clear... I don't remember if he had problems with yellow/blue.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Disclaimer: think this was done at Caltech once... they were thinking up cool ways to mess w/ the light,(someone left a cherry-picker unoccupied..oops!) and came up w/ the Simple Solution... but the repairmen had to look at the thing for hours before they figured out what insane modifications those 'techers must have made to it... after all, everyone knows how geeks love wires and stuff, right? ;)
Some mention has been made about how a major step in GUIs won't really be made until there's some sort of giant leap in display technology. Others were saying that it wouldn't happen until something other than a mouse or keyboard was the primary input device. This got me thinking...
There have been many articles about up and coming display technologies, for very flat, flexible displays of very high resolution that should start appearing in about five years time. I also thought about alternative input devices, such as pen tablets, touch screens, and speech.
If we had a very thin, flexible, large, and very high res display (say 18" tall by 24" wide, thin as a credit card, flexible as a mouse-pad), and had it be touch-sensitive using a pen-stylus, our desktop might actually *become* our desk top. No bulky CRT/display, keyboard, or mouse. Just a pen and speech input, allowing us to naturally draw/write right on forms or in windows, or take dictation and edit using the pen.
I'm sure such new hardware would *definitely* result in a revolution in standard UIs.
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
I'm assuming you've got a Windows system. Those who run Linux, like me, can easily emulate this train wreck in X with GTK, KDE, Xt, Motif, Athena, and straight Xlib applications.
Barf. Barf. Barf! Death to skins everywhere. Give me a good-looking, powerful, *standard*, incredibly intuitive interface. Hopefully someone's researching this.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The GUIs we use now are almost the best we can do with our current input devices, so instead of making new GUIs we need to make them faster and easier. To make them faster, we need direct access and logical organisation. If i have to open a file from c:\program files\borland\cbuilder3\include\vcl\sdf\sdre, it can take a while to click on all the right folders in an open file dialog box. It goes faster if i just type in the full path, but it would be even better to just say "open vcl\sdf\sdre in bcb3 includes" (of course, speech recognition is always faster than typing, but even something like this is faster than putting the full path). Some text-based interfaces are actually faster than a GUI, because you type the direct path instead of clicking on each directorr after scrolling through the list (when you have a lot of files and directories, the list can get pretty long and it's easy to pass the one your looking for). A better interface would be to let you type the first few letters of the filename to find it, and/or use the mouse to pick the right file. A more logical organisation would help too: if you could have a system of menus (like the KDE menus that let you find files on your hard drive (i made windows keep menus like this for my desktop, c:\ and my documents :) ) instead of a dialog box, it would be a lot easier to learn and use. And another way to improve an interface is to reduce input. If i can type just enough letters so the GUI knows what file i'm looking for, instead of the whole name, or if menus pop up after the mouse is over them for 1 second instead of waiting for me to click, it's easier and faster to use.
I hope you understand what I just wrote, because I don't
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
GUI's haven't changed and won't change until the human/computer interface is alot better. I'm sorry, Keyboards and mice, while they work, aren't exactly what I'd choose for input.
I know IBM was working on a system that reacted to body movement and language, teaching the computers human rather than the humans computer. Much better IMHO
-- taking over the world, we are.
May sound a little strange, but you got me thinking, if you are to implement a type of GUI in a 3d "world" as such, ie rooms and signs on the walls, you would still need an interface to the computer which allows you to intuitively access that interface.
:) But its all fine and dandy to have a 3d world as your interface, aka VRML etc, but when you sit in front of your computer you still have to use your mouse and keyboard to access that world!
Sorry I think i'm almost loosing myself there..
Hey it looks easy but when you compare games controls ie, Quake / Doom / Unreal / whatever you will see everyone has their own customised controls. Some use the mouse to move, some to look, some not at all!
The worst is when you try to use someone else's controls, you find yourself lost!
That's not intuitive.
I learn a lot about the state of my truck from the sounds that it makes. How could that be intagrated in to a GUI?
http://www.wordservices.org
Word Services allows any application to link to a speller, grammar checker or other text service as if it is built-in.
It's a huge advantage to the user because a single GUI spellchecker can be shared between all their applications. Also once a program that uses text is Word Services-enabled, the user can add new text services as they are produced without any further effort on the part of the original application programmer.
It is a public protocol. No license fee or nondisclosure is required to use it. There is a free developer kit for the systems that currently support it.
It was originally written on the MacOS, where it used Apple Events and the Apple Object Model (which is also the basis for Apple Script). It was later implemented on the BeOS BeOS where it uses BMessages and the BeOS scripting API which is implemented in the BeOS Application Kit.
I have it in mind to implement it in XWindows on top of the CORBA interface that is used for scripting in Gnome.
I haven't had time to work on a Gnome version yet but if someone else wants to play with this email me at crawford@goingware.com and we can discuss how it could be done.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Last summer a partner and I implemented the rudiments of a 3d user interface based around providing a set of services. The user would be able to move around in an unlimited size 3d environment with the services of the O/S tracking him/her. We were working on letting the user pull up familiar services such as text editing, spreadsheets in a 3d envirionment, but we quickly ran into a lot of revelations. I have them all written down somewhere but these are off the top of my head. If you'd like to talk about it more just email me. Anyway, I am kind of tired so this may ramble.
-It is more difficult to do any trivial application in 3d.
-We felt that at the root of this problem was a fact about how computers developed. We as humans primarily deal in two dimensional medium on computers (documents, spreadsheets, power point, code). Computers evolved to facilitate these flat tasks and hense the desktop interface.
-The desktop interface works very well for handling 2d media.
-3d environments offer great possibilites for relating information.
-3d interfaces work much better if the system is smarter. If you don't have to go worry about arranging directories or setting configurations. [running to another room and climbing a tower to throw a lever to change resolution would be a pain after a while <- we tried]
-People will only embrace a new interface if it simplifies a task over the previous.
-If resolution increases in 3d environments they will become more desirable. For example you could roll out a sheet of paper in a 3d environent that represented your conventional settings.
-A network based 3d envrionment implies a new sense of things. Other networks or computers become space. So I could be in my bank's website and pull up a word processor in front of my avatar.
-This is moving more into the realm of "virtual reality" which I know everyone is jaded about, but I see it as a smooth transition.
-People like communication and society especially if they can be anonymous. Being able to move around with the power of your computer in a 3d anony 3d environment would make a lot of people happy.
Honestly, from having worked with it I think that a base 3d interface is coming, but I don't think it will totally surplant 2d. What we have now is really very good for doing pratical work.
Also if anyone has the time. It would really be helpful if more work was done on voice and gesture control (mouse, pen, puck, hand, glove).
User Interface Markup Language is a device independent way of creating interfaces. For instance, UIML intefaces would display as well on a Palm as a desktop. XUL (Extendable User-interface Language) for Mozilla is another effort. Orbeon is working on a project called Albatross which is to be a GUI for all browsers. Thanks to the folks at ShouldExis t for these links.
I would like to see a fully 3D (or 4D) interface in my lifetime. I read an article in Discover several years ago about a researcher who was building a time-dimensional filesystem. You could scroll back to the state of your file at any time in the past, just like you would scroll to the top. I thought it was ludicrous, but disks have gotten awfully cheap since then, and the idea, strangely, has remained prominent in my mind.
.BMP files, except organized in such a way that you can never view more than a small piece of the image at a time.
That said, there is an awful lot left to be done with 2D interfaces. 2D interfaces have not changed since the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, and as we all know, those ideas were pioneered at Xerox even earlier.
Those ideas, like hierarchical menus, were strong ones, which is why they have persisted...but they are getting unbearably stale.
If I want to perform a command in a windowed application, I have to visually navigate to the command's unique spatial location in a tree structure where no more than two of the leaves are visible at any one time.
This over-organization is why so many savvy users have stuck to the command line after all these years.
Consider these questions:
* Why do most commands exist in one spatial location in a fixed 2D map? (example: File--> Print Setup--> Page Orientation)
Ideally, all commands would be available in all situations where they might apply.
* Why is the interface the same regardless of the task being performed?
* Why is the interface density the same regardless of my skill level?
If I know all the hotkeys, why must I stare at icons while I'm working?
If I need to recover those icons, why aren't *all* of them recoverable with just few mouse clicks?
(The only current analogy is 'Full Screen Mode', but this is an absolute, and I've seen no examples of modes in between.)
* Why do I have to navigate to help text that is in a different spatial location than the command for which it applies?
Pop-up context is great. How come I never get more than three words of explanation, though?
To some extent, these questions are being slowly addressed. For example, the interface to edit a Word document is different from the interface to Preview it. However, I've seen no evidence that anyone has identified these issues and is working to address them in a systematic manner.
2D interfaces for the past fifteen years have just been big
Interfaces should be *programs* that dynamically (and dare I say) intelligently respond to your implicit needs and explicit requests.
Death to the Macintosh. Death to the command line!
"I think a lot of effort is being misdirected into making flashy looking UIs. A UI should certainly look nice, but what do 3-d, "skinnable" apps, giant icons and superfluous animation add to the usability of computer technology?"
I think this sort of stuff falls under the category of "fun." Why do people add stripes to the sides of their cars? Why do people put posters on their walls? Skins on apps and WMs aren't much different. Some people like to make the things they work with a little prettier, a little crazier, a little bit different. I'd say it's part of being human.
I have been a GUI designer now for going on 5 years. Although I have many great new ideas for how users could better interact with their computers, I can't get paid to implement most of them. The current belief among most companies is that if you change the way computers act you will scare away most of your customers. This and the fact that a good program is worth millions in sales, makes very few companies feel like taking the risk (and very few OPEN SOURCE projects from the looks of KDE/GNOME/ENLIGHTMENT/ETC). It wasn't until just the last couple of years that I have been able to get companies where I have worked to let me seriously change the way that my programs look.
Having worked with many other UI Designers in the same situation, I can safely say that NEW UI's are indeed around the corner. This is going to require that people learn new ways to use their computers, and this may scare many current users. As long as the new interface is more efficient it will eventually become the new standard. Five years ago almost no one knew what a start menu was and now every OS has one. For those of you that don't remember, everyone complained. With such a minor change being balked at, imagine what a 3D UI controlled with a gyro sensor 6 point mouse is going to do.
HINT: Damn near cause street riots, especially if MS does it, right?
The last obstacle is: who will be the 1st person to fund one of us?? After all man can not live on bread alone, EVEN LINUS PAYS THE BILLS THESE DAYS.
This all being said, until a major funded project takes off, you will have to deal with a few new features per year eased onto the corporations and the public alike. After all new a paradigm would scare away even most of you. This is easily proveable, just look at the multitude of 3d UI hate fan messages this article seems to have garnered from the TROLL FARMS.
How about killing Unix processes with a gun in DoomAdmin?
I've found that learning another key layout is a lot like learning another language, except that the transition time to full fluency is much shorter. While at first you may find (to your horror) that you can't type QWERTY anymore, it is possible to learn to use both fluently and naturally.
For me, it used to be that I required at least two hours to switch back and forth between layouts. But after a lot of practice, it now takes me about one minute to switch between the two. Of course, if you have to use a QWERTY during the week or two that you're learning Dvorak, it might take a little longer to learn...
Ironically, some of the most pioneering and fascinating psychological research was done by Microsoft in developing their Office suite.
They discovered that people react to computers just as they would to humans, and imbue their software with human characteristics. Just a few of the many examples:
- People perceive specialized tools to be more important, informative, and interesting than general tools, even when the tools themselves are identical. People watching news on a TV found it of higher quality when they were told that the network - or even the TV itself - was a "news network" or a "news television".
- People assign their gender biases to computers. Male-voiced computers are viewed as more serious, and more knowledgeable about technical topics. Female-voiced computers are perceived to be better versed in relationships, but people don't like being evaluated by a female computer.
- A computer that praises itself will be viewed somewhat negatively, but a computer that is praised by another computer is seen as more intelligent. Conversely, a computer that criticizes another is itself seen as more intelligent.
The trouble is that, when you roll all these facets into an actual software design, you come up with.... (drum roll...) the Office Assistant.
For a really great read on the psychological study side of this research, pick up _The Media Equation_, Reeves & Nass, 1996.
Here's an example.
"The"
Now I'm not sure if it's the most common word in the English language, but it's at least up there in the top five. To type "the" in QWERTY, you must stretch your left index finger diagonally right, then stretch your right index finger to the left, and then stretch your left middle finger up and to the left a little bit. Three finger stretches in as many letters on what is arguably the most common word in the English language.
Now contrast this with how it would be done in Dvorak. The 't' is pressed with your right middle finger, the 'h' is pressed with your right index finger, and the 'e' is pressed with your left middle finger, all in the home row. Not only do your fingers not have to extend at all, but they make a nice little drumming motion with the right hand.
As for the whole "switching hands" thing, I believe it's the other way around. The Dvorak keyboard is laid out in such a way that all the vowels are all on the left hand home row and the most common consonants are in the right hand home row. This pretty much guarantees that unless you're typing Welsh, you will change hands at least once during every single word.
And if you still aren't convinced, sit a seasoned Dvorak typist and a QWERTY typist down together, and watch them type. You'll probably notice that the QWERTY typist moves around the keyboard like he's playing a Rachmaninoff concerto, while the Dvorak typist will remain relatively static. Speeds may vary, but Dvorak's a lot less likely to give you RSI.
The only small drawback to the command line is that you have to know the command. Why? Because the computer is a very literal machine, if you say OPEN MYDOC.TXT (supposing that is a valid command) it will work beautifully, but if you forget type FETCH MYDOC.TXT the computer wont know what you're talkng about. The solution is NOT to put a menu with a "save" entry that sends the correct command! The solution is to make the computer be able to figure out what every command means. Don't hardcode ANY commands in, instead write a natural speech recognition program, have it intercept the command, figure out what you mean, and invoke the most probable function. If it can't decide which is better, have it prompt the user ("Do you mean 'open mydoc.txt' or 'call my doctor'?").
You're smart people, you can see that the next thing would be to remove the keyboard and speak the command. Sure sure, but that's only for convenience. Typing would do just as well. Most everybody can use a keyboard, or learn quickly.
The cluttered room is the best metaphor for organizing files. In a room it's easy to seperate things out by location. "In THAT corner is my porn collection, and in THAT corner is the book I'm writing." No filenames required there, very intuitive.
So what you do is put on some of them fancy VR glasses. I'm not talking about total-imersion 3D looks-like-reality stuff. Just glasses you can see through. Overlay on these glasses, and thus on your vision, bits of a computer (think bright, neon colored, floating objects). Put on a glove that the computer knows where is, and viola! One can now manipulate and sort files. Combine with this voice-recognition and smart programs that do what you mean and not what you say, and you have the best user experience yet. Leave your files laying all over the world! Walk to them if you like, or ask the computer to fetch them to your location. Put data (images, text, etc.) in floating boxes! Walk around and manipulate it by speaking/typing/reaching out and grabbing.
Sure, some of this isn't technically possible just now, but it could be. Even if it never is done, some parts would be bloody good things to have.
I want my Cowboyneal
Here's how it worked, roughly, and from memory of many years ago [before I turned into a stereotypical unix geek, and everything was still somewhat mystical to me]:
In everyone's home directory were a variety of .snapshot-* directories, which automagically stored archives of various timespans of files which had been deleted or modified. IIRC (once again, it's been awhile), these archives were on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. So, if your .newsrc were to get hosed, you could just go back a day and retreive it. Or, suppose an untested change to your procmail configs starts sending everything to /dev/null, and you don't notice for several days because you don't get much mail - just go back a week and snag the old, working copy. Only changed/deleted files showed up in the snapshot directories, so it was fairly space-efficient.
The system seemed to work pretty well, though I only made use of it a few times. I've got no idea if this is a standard NetApps-specific thing, or supplied by some third-party daemon, and I've certainly never noticed anything of this sort for Linux or the BSDs.
If anyone has any specifics about this sort of thing, I'd love to see them.
[Ob-OnTopic: Since this already exists, Dumpster and Landfill icons already have the needed back-end support, though possibly only on a very sheltered platform...]
Kid-proof tablet..
> Absolutely nothing looks worse than a screen cluttered with seventeen different-looking applications
.gtkrc file, which is used by all the other GTK apps scattered all over my desktop.
I mostly agree, and this puts me in mind of something I've been meaining to Ask Slashdot -
Mozilla skins are built on top of GTK, right? If so, is there an easy way to "unskin" it to get "naked GTK"? That would be nice, presuming that the "naked GTK would pick up the nice theme from my
Thanx.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That still holds somewhat true. The regular user doesn't like any changes to what they are used to, thus most programs stick with what people can already deal with. Basically the subject of this message is the point of why little innovation may be needed, or maybe even hurts the products selling points!
Some interfaces that are particularly perplexing to the average user are: Bryce 3D (too much candy, where do I press things!), MacOS (one button does everything, and nothing, but I'm used to a 2-3 button mouse), Blender (nice try, but somethings are still not in the GUI, means maybe the design was insufficient to handle change!), XWindows (it all depends on the window manager first, then there are so many different Widget libraries out there, like Athena, that don't work like todays fully functional GUIs). These are a few, I'm sure you can think of more...perhaps a list, with reasons is in order, or maybe for fun, a Slashdot vote for the hardest GUI to use that is still in use today (not including TUI/CLIs of course!)
-=Long Island Man=-
For craps sake people, give it up already.
::shudders::)
Any GUI which used openGL acceleration to OPEN AND CLOSE WINDOWS is a ABSOLUTE WASTE OF CPU CYCLES.
Hmm, lets see here now, how exacly would that work with those pages that open up about 10 more pop-ups?
Ever been in those loops, where if you close the pop-up it opens up even more pop-ups?
Oh great, crash an Apple, open up a few dozen windows!
Ugh, evil evil thing.
3d-boarders, whats next, real time enviromental bump mapping (and if ANYBODY and I mean ANYBODY, responds to this and says that feature is already implemented on all MacOSx windows, I swear to god I will be IMMENSLY pissed, for one thing, they will have missed the point entirly. Though I do HOPE it isn't implemented, ugh, mabye I'm giving apple ideas
When I start up a computer I want it to GO.
As in fast.
As in WORK.
As in MACHINE AGE.
I like beige, heck, I LOVE beige, there are so many different variations of beige it is amazing.
I also love steel, as in my 486 case which is darn near (mabye it is?!?!?) bullet proof.
This this has been stepped on, dropped, squished, thrown arounds, etc.
It still works.
I would like to see you do that with an IMac (unshatterable case, hardly, give me a good hammer and I'll give ya at least a crack or two!)
BSD system lies underneath? Yah, so what, its wasted on the stupidest user base that crawls on the face of the earth ( thats crawls, as in what snails and other lower forms of life do, C-R-A-W-L-S, most oftem times through the muck.)
GUI research, ok, heres your GUI research.
USE A DAMN COMMAND LINE.
Its *QUICKER*
Its *FASTER*
Its *MORE EFFICENT*
and
It *DOES NOT CRASH*
Seriusly though folks, even DOS, heck, when was the last time DOS (pre 6.22, heh) crashed on ya?
If somthing goes wrong, it should NEVER BE THE OS.
OS's should be under 100k, and written entirly in assembly/binary.
Anything else is a waste.
Anything which required me spending 10 seconds+ to find an icon to run a single program is a waste.
how to I cope with win9x?
Simple,
Windows Key-R
I run it all through the little run box, I have almost every program directory on my fat32 partition memorized.
Give it up for true Nerdome folks,
Oh yah, and don't forget to through out the GUI's
(except for Rhino3d's GUI, NICE GUI, heck, great GUI, I especialy love the fact that it has a, you guessed it, command prompt built in! Heh, I can't stand a 3d-package that doesn't allow me to just type in Square and draw a square!)
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Consider the use of computers for information gathering (trying to understand the latest stock market trends, someone else's source code, etc).
To support this task "The more relevant information within eyespan, the better. Simplicity of reading derives from the context of detailed and complex information, properly arranged." [Tufte, Visualizing Information]. (Seeing context and details within eyespan reduces context switching and memory load: you don't have to remember what you saw on one screen when looking at the details on another one if you can see it all at once.)
A good user interface to support this task not only needs to make very good use of the little available screen estate (low screen size, low resolution), but needs to be tailor-made for the information at hand so that this info can be arranged and presented properly and allows the user to interact with it in a way that is natural for the given domain. Ideally, all that is left on the screen is information: the information becomes the interface.
Developing such tailor-made interfaces is hard even with the proper support, but what makes it worse is the fact that standard UI libraries only support more generic approaches (standard widgets and interaction idioms, etc).
In a nutshell: I think users will be able to much more effectively use computers when programmers stop using generic "user interfaces" and instead develop tailor-made ones even if/though this adds an additional learning obstacle for users.
It would be nice if I could resist pointing to my company infotectonica which sells Juliet: a product that has such a tailor-made interface to aid programmers explore and understand Java libraries.
I'm also very impressed with the BeOS GUI all tho my testing of it isn't very extensive. I find it fresh, with crisp colors, enlightening icons, and easy to use. And big plus to them for keeping the command line ;) Which does get things done better/faster at times.
If you examine the development of GUI's so far, they've increasingly moved towards multi-dimensionality - i.e. many windows, many tasks operating at once, personal adaptability, etc.
Perhaps the next user interfaces are really 3d and immersive; i.e. you sit within a spatial field and around you in 360degrees is your operating environment. It's gibsonesque, and requires another round of technological advances.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
Anyone bothering to be 'researching' new GUIs ought to be looking 3 to 5 years ahead and looking at developing something that may be around in 10 years.
Given the rate of increase in computer speed, it's not so stupid to be working on 3D and speach controlled GUIs.
Famy
Ask, and it shall be given (to) you; Seek, and ye shall find; Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one
It's hard to find good links (Google) about Myron Krueger's Videodesk, but I think it very interesting.
In the early 90s, Krueger had a prototype of an actual desk (as in wooden) that was watched by a videocamera and projected upon.
The computer detected things like paper sheets and your fingers on the desk and projected virtual (he called it "artificial reality") things over it. You could see virtual text on a real sheet and move text by forming a box with your fingers and moving it to the new location. Of course, to input a document into the system you would just put it on the desk.
I'd like to see something like that. It would be cool (and more ergonomic than staring to a 14" TV).
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Well, Why 3D was the original reason for my post. Perhaps I should have emphasized the "Not".
My argument is that 3d "should" be able to give you more functionality / access to information _because_ of the additional depth. Yes, there is the prospect of visual overload. But we _live_ in a 3D world, and we've learned how to take advantage of it. As for navigation and losing material, that's where translucense comes in handy. I just keep thinking of all the 3D video games that I play, and how much more functional their interfaces are than standard 2D ones. Homeworld, for example allows a very nifty 3D rotational map with effective zooming in and out. Grouping things into spherical shells is very efficient, and doesn't provide information overload as quickly as a 2D representation.
For example, take the icons on the desktop. Sure they can get overbearing. I can't have more than 10 on my desktop or I just ignore them (if it takes me more than 3 seconds to find something, it's not functional). You can get around this by putting things on different regions of the desktop; I use the Start menu for some things, the quick-launch bar for others, and the desktop for still others.. I've trained my mind on where to find these things. This is how we work in real life. We quickly get overloaded when there isn't enough unique sensation to identify objects in our mind. By finding objects in unique settings, we better remember them (supposedly that's how you remember people's names.. though I've never fully figured that one out). Having a 3D GUI could allow you to have a hell of a lot more ready information at your finger tips while at the same time REDUCING information overload.
Here is a plausible example. Let's take my MP3 drive. It has nearly 20 Gig of stuff on it right (all legal by the way). Finding stuff is a bitch. My solutions have been to A) produce sym-linked directories for the many types of catagories: personal favorits, genres, and authors. B) Produce a database which fetches path/file names based on query info. The second solution doesn't work very well with play-lists (except in generating text-files). A 3D interface could show me each and every MP3, including information about them. I could navigate a 3D neural-network-like interface where at each node there was associated information. You could not possibly fit all of this into a 2D screen, but in 3D, you could zoom in and out (while having only more important information visible while zoomed out); you could trace associations from one title or author to the next, etc. Granted this sound like a rather complex task... And for a simple MP3 database it would be. But image your entire filesystem if it were handled this way (or at least viewed this way).
The first thought that comes to mind is Jurrassic park in the little girls famous quote "It's a UNIX system". Course that interface was terribly impractical. If you knew the command-line name and it's arguments, that would have been incredibly faster. But I think part of the point here is to evolve the GUI into something that is more intuitive than a command line, and yet can provide more information than a 2D GUI, and ideally be as intuitive as real life.
All I'm saying is that I prefer 3D video games to 2D video games, and there is no reason to believe that we can't make 3D GUIs that are just as desirable. Maybe First Person isn't the answer, but it's short sighted or uninformed to only comment on them.
As for the wasted CPU cycles, seeing as how most of this is offloaded to the graphics hardware, I don't see how they're wasted.. Buying a $400 video card and only using it 5% of the time (when you're playing games) seems like more of a waste to me. Also, if done properly, a 3D interface could consume less memory. Wireframe, for example, consumes considerably less memory than layers apon layers of bitmaps. Granted, MIP-Mapped textures, lighting maps and environment maps take up a hell of a lot more memory.
-Michael
-Michael
And with the natural degradation of magnetic information stored on tape, you get information decay/decomposition. :-)
The problem is that we've reached an innovation-less circle of annoyance when it comes to Operating Systems and their GUIs... Apple's copying Microsoft... Microsoft's copying Apple... everyone else is copying those two. Of course, sure, a few new bells in whistles get added into this feedback loop, but mostly, there is no real innovation.
WorldMaker
Female Prison Rape in NY
Having used Linux almost exclusively for years, I have found that I managed to unlearn some of the other GUI elements. There was one time I sat down at either a Mac or a Windows box and couldn't figure out why there were icons for programs that weren't running and none for programs that were running. The concept of having the filesystem visible in windows and in the background was just one I had entirely forgotten about. I've had times when I couldn't understand that it's okay that you can't iconify windows on Macs.
So there really is quite a bit of variation in GUIs, enough to significantly confuse people who aren't used to the particular style they are using.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
You won't need a stopwatch, only a willingness to uncritically swallow an "executive summary". Stopwatches appear to be the rarer of the two.
Tognazzini wrote:
Note, "cursor keys", not "keyboard".
Never mind the absurdity of reporting the times to four significant digits. He said, again, "cursor keys", not "keyboard". He had the users move the text cursor with the arrow keys alone, from one "|" to the next.
Here's another way to do it, using the keyboard. Got your stopwatch?
Six seconds, independent of the length of the paragraph or number of changes. (That's ed(1); "ed is the standard text editor".)
Even if you constrain the user to move the cursor to each "|", one by one, the keyboard is faster: for instance, in vi(1), "{/|^[re" and then repeat "n." But why would you make the user do that? That's not just ignoring the utility of the keyboard, but of the computer itself. So the mouse is faster than the arrow keys at performing task X forty-two times? If you use the computer as a fucking computer instead of crippling it to the level of a typewriter, then you don't do it forty-two times; you do it once. Tognazzini's test suffers from Mac tunnel vision.
It might be argued that automated repetition defeats the true purpose of the test -- that it isn't about replacing "|" with "e" forty-two times, that that isn't a real-world editing task but just a stand-in for forty-two different tasks.
Better for the keyboard! A keyboard does have keys other than arrow keys -- it has keys that bear the very same characters that appear in text. There is an obvious correspondence between a character on the keyboard and a character in the document, one about as "intuitive" as you can get. This lets the user press the keys to locate the corresponding character in the document, either individually, or sequentially to magically form composites we call "words" that have meaning within the user's task.
Using the keyboard, the user can have the computer find the correct location, rather than being forced to do it himself, visually, with the possibility of error. What if Tognazzini's test had not involved finding the vertical bars, which are visually distinctive in text, but, say, replacing "blue" with "green" throughout a ten-page document? How many instances would have been missed? Do you want to cut the blue wire, or the green one? Are you sure?
(Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say "|" was visually distinctive? Here you are, user: take your mouse and change every "|" in this Helvetica paragraph. Don't touch any "I" or "l" or "1", though.)
The mouse ignores the semantic content of the characters and symbols, words and keywords, blocks and sentences.... It even ignores the symbols themselves; it wanders haphazardly over a picture of the document (a static picture, if you're lucky; ever try using a mouse to select something that doesn't hold still because the window is being written to?)
Revised Executive Summary: the mouse is faster than the keyboard that has nothing but four arrow keys, when errors don't matter. Oh, wait. That has qualifying clauses, which makes it too hard for an executive to understand. When they are therefore ignored, we'll be back where we started. However, real keyboards don't actually have just four keys, and errors do matter, so we can rephrase. Revised^2 Executive Summary: the mouse isn't faster than the keyboard. Better, but that negation might still go over management's heads. Oh well, that's why we techies get paid the big bucks. Six is less than 50.22, so: Revised^3 Executive Summary: the keyboard is faster than the mouse.
It sounds like all you suggest is far better handled with a simple 'smart' indexing file system that allows natural language queries ("show me all MP3s by X", "Show me all my jazz music", etc.)
I don't think a '3-d' interface adds ANYTHING to a file handling interface or a 'desktop'.
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
i like the ideas that you've outlined here...
I've been trying to come up with a model to insulate users from the whole filesystem fiasco...
email me, maybe we can bounce ideas...
... hi bingo
That statements a little disingenuous. The original filesystem on the Macintosh and the Macintosh 512. What was later called the MFS file system; the one for 400K diskettes and no real folders. That filesystem allowed 255 character file names.
By the time Apple got to the Mac Plus, Apple was trying to develop filesystems that would scale better to larger filesystems and created HFS. At this time, they reduced the number of characters in filenames from 255 to 31.
So yes, Apple had 255 character filenames from day one, but they didn't have them on day 750 through day 6000. (750 being approx the number of days between the release of the original mac and the mac plus. 6000 being approx the number of days between the 128K mac and the public beta of OS X)
I liked the idea behine Europa when I saw it. Simple 3d shell for Windoze that treated windows like pages, that could be zoomed in an out of a 3d desktop. It's the closest I've seen to a "Johnny Mnemonic" interface.
It uses the scroll wheel to adjust window depth, giving the ability to really put a window in the background.
Last time I checked it out it had some limitations, like not updating windows in the background (static "snapshots" only), OpenGL dependant, only Windoze, etc..
The trashcan idea was actually Apple's before it was Microsoft's. It was on the MacOS before Windows 95 (the first MS OS to use the recycle bin) copied it. I have no idea who's idea it was before Apple's -- if anybody's.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.