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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?
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...
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.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
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.
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"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.
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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
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!"
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
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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
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
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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
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!
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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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?
I love it because it reminds me of win 98 out of the box. Noisy, cluttered, presumptious (esp about MIME), 100 megs+ install and crashes randomly.
I'll stick with ICEWM thank you very much, and KDE when I have to.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
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 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.
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
However, i think these problems could be overcome simply not using a realworld 3d methaphore. We can make traveling between 2 points instantaneous, and making no text, only showing a tooltip(or simmilar) when focusing attention into it. also, objects don't have to be static, we should be able to recall them in some way.
An example of using it:
Well, i don't know why i typed this way too long nonsense...
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...
The 'explorer' file dialogs, where files are listed in a variable number of fixed length columns, scrolling off to the right. So you see files A-C in the first column, D-F in the second, and you have to scroll way over to the right to see files X-Z.
I agree, that organization just sucks when there are lots of files. When there are small numbers, it's really indistinguishable from a more sane organization.
Luckily, you can click the 'details' button, and it becomes a one-line-per-file display, that scrolls down. But you see far fewer files at once (but more info about them). At least you're given a choice. Now, if only all apps respected that choice, and defaulted to your last selected display mode. Unfortunately, this sort of behavoir has to be coded for in each and every dialog, so some apps do and most apps don't.
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
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?
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?"
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
Desktop
You are standing in an open field to the west of a bar. There are some icons in the bar.
>examine icons
You can't see any icons here!
>e
Launcher Bar
This is a narrow room with passages leading west to the Desktop and north to an xterm window. In addition, a set of stairs leads down into darkness. There is a Netscape icon here. There is a StarOffice icon here. There is a gaim icon here.
Your pointer is glowing with a faint blue glow.
>click netscape
What do you want to click the Netscape icon with?
>click netscape with pointer
A violent rumbling comes from the ground. A previously unseen door opens to the southwest, revealing a brightly colored splash screen. After a moment, the rumbling stops, and the splash screen is replaced by an instance of Netscape Navigator 4.72, process number 5188.
Your pointer has begun to glow very brightly.
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
> 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.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
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).
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Case in point: If I'm teaching someone Linux, I have to teach them cd, and ls and what they do, and then get them to associate in memory that the utilities that reside on their machine are in /bin, and so on for every other command and important location. With a windowed interface, operations are a little simpler, but you still have to recall directory and folder locations, and how to drill down from one to another. If I teach a 3d interface, all I have to say is "these three keys make you walk; this button opens/uses something". I don't have to tell them that you get from one room to another by walking through a door, or that tools are in the garage and food is in the kitchen. As soon as they see with the room with the drill press that represents LaTeX and the chainsaw that is gcc hanging from the wall, they know where similar things are going to be stored. It lets people use their "real-world" reason on what is normally a very abstract system of representation.
And besides. . . for anyone who grew up in the last 20 years, nothing is more intuitive than a video game controller!
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
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
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