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The Next Computer Interface
BoarderPhreak was among the several readers who pointed out "an interesting article on the various alternatives to storing your files using a 'desktop' metaphor" at TechReview.com. "New styles like time-indexing, 3D sphere ala SGI's file manager, and even a 3D virtual 'task gallery' from Microsoft. Screenshots available in the article." All of these have been floating around for a while; hopefully soon some radically different interfaces will actually gain widespread acceptance.
There's a great Slash-based site with loads of articles examining potential next-gen interfaces. Not a huge amount of traffic yet, but the editor seems to be consistently putting up new articles. Check out Nooface.
--LP
The future of interfaces will be controlled by the user. Not all users work best in the same way. Sure you can spend money researching to find the common interface that everyone is average in their productivity, but in the end the productivity is with in the users themselves, and the interface that works best for them. So the future of computers in general is adaptable interfaces.
disclaimer : My views do not represent those of every one else in slashdot.
When it comes to organizing my files/folder/shortcuts, I very rarelu use the Start Menu. Instead, I've been using The Brain, which treats documents, programs, shortcuts, program groups, etc as "thoughts" which you can link to any other thought. Pretty cool.
Expecting lots of screenshots on the front page...the first thing I saw was the title "The Next Computer Interface" and a picture of that guy.
Run for your lives!!! =)
... and there was me thinking the NeXT computer interface was the ultimate computer interface ...
All of these gimmicks tend to miss out on the fact that a simple linear system is much better for _people_ than the fancy gimmicks which developers think are cool. Voice interaction is a classic example of something that can be thought of as "cool" until you have an open plan office with 30 people talking at their computers.
3D is another dead end. IBM's Home project found that people would "lose" things in a 3D environment and in fact the visual cues of the 2D desktop were better suited to the task.
At the end of the day the mantra should be KISS. These break that mantra and add very little except cool graphics. It looks nice but doesn't function well. An everyday example of why simple is better are the icons used to denote things like "radiation", "poison" etc etc they don't actually represent the thing themselves but provide a simple shorthand for the thing. This simplification makes them much better at describing and classifying than attempting a "realistic" presentation.
Good examples of 2D simple interfaces are things like Google. Why would 3D make Google better ? It wouldn't.
Pretty != better. More Gimmicks != simpler
KISS
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
.... the desktop/hierarchical structure thing isn't just a metaphor. people STILL USE in and out trays, filing cabinets, rolodexes, pen holders, noticeboards and so on. the desktop is one of two things :
a) a tried and tested system which works, and is already fairly* well established in the minds of billions of well-organised people, and was evolved over hundreds of years of trial and error by people who actually NEEDED to organise stuff
b) outmoded and ready for the trash heap.
take your pick.
I applaud the effort to find something better, but really, i think "natural selection" would have found a better real-world parallel if it existed.
relationships between files in the structure is a brilliant idea, but that's just metadata and cross-referencing.
- says the man with the cluttered desk - at least my machines don't have virtual beer bottles leaving ringmarks on my HTML documents.
*irony
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
Many people prefer 1-dimensional (command line) to 2-dimensional (desktop), so why "move on" to 3D?
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Seems like the topic of VR/3D methods of information presentaion come up regularly. In Web land years back, we had people enamored of VRML: they wanted to use it as the primary navigation on an important site, and we pretty much nixed the idea as being too expensive, non-intuitive, and annoying to the user.
The major problem is that the computer is a 2D display device, so whenever moving to a 3D representaion, you are really getting a 2D representation of a 3D represenation of information, with only 2D tools to use to get at that info (i.e. mouse, keyboard).
I tried to use a 3D file manager for about a week, once, and found it unintuitive, silly, and a general pain to try to use. Why? Because I don;t want to wander through virtual galleries of items before finding the one I want: I've got a memory/filing system that makes it easier for the 2D computer system I use.
Unless the peripherals and OSes become 3D oriented, I don;t really see that changing. The desktop metaphor works for the type of information we store on our computers.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
why don't we replace the usual desktop metaphor by a game metaphor?
Just imagine: To delete a file you don't have to drag it to the trashbin but you can shoot at it. And depending on the type of weapon you are using there is a chance to recover the file if you (of course accidentially) hit the wrong file...
From my point of view a computer was designed to take work away from the user and not to put extra work on him by applying some stupid metaphors. Every metaphor that requires interaction like mouse movement and klicking is wasting the users time because its hard to make it automatically. But that's what the computer should do, doing the jobs automatically. I don't enjoy a copy job that requires me to push and pull a mouse and gives me as a sort of reward a stupid animation of flying papers.
When I use 3D interfaces on PCs, I tend to get seasick. A CAVE, with motion tracking and powered by a real computer, is much better in this regard, but motion tracking works only for a single person at a time, and suck caves are still quite expensive. I bet some people get seasick when using them, too.
The main problem with current desktop systems is not the metaphor of a 2D desktop itself, but rather that as computers have become more powerful, and more complicated, we end up with more junk to wade through. It's exactly the same with a "real" desktop too. The more files you pile on your desk, the harder it is to find something. So it would seem that in keeping with the KISS principle, we shouldn't be trying to find a new metaphor, but instead improving our current one.
/home/
One of the main problems today is that the OS doesn't make the best use of the information available to it. The OS can know the file type, the application(s) associated to those files, when the file was created etc. but in general, it doesn't do much with that information. Sure, if you double-click on your file, it can find & launch the application associated to the file type, but you're still left with the problem of finding that file.
My own proposal would be to make better use of the file information that the OS has available to it. Its theory, but basically you place a database layer over the filesystem. We should also make use of MIME types for each file, and create a hierachical directory structure, one for each MIME type inside the users "home" directory. As a simple example, you may have something like:
user1/
files/
image/
jp eg/
pn g/
x- bmp/
audio/
x- mp3/
Now we have this, we can put the information we have to good use. Whenever a file is created, rather than asking the user for a directory and a filename, we ask them for a description of the file. Create the file in whichever directory suits the files MIME type, with a system generated filename, and add an entry for the file into the database which is layered above the FS. The record should include the users long description, type, creation date etc.
Now when the user wants to find & open a file, they can easily find their file by e.g the decription, using a wildcard if they wish. Or the creation date, using a range is they want to. The major advantage is that they don't need to navigate through a heirachical directory structure, nor do they need to remember what type of file their looking for, as the OS can present all of the files that the user can open as a flat list in the dialog.
O.K, it's a clumsy description, but the basic premise is that a) The OS can handle placing the file on the FS instead of forcing the user to decide & b) We know have a flat list of files to manage, instead of a possibly very complex heirachical tree. We do retain the advantages of the hierachical tree for the filesystem, however.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
back in the early 90's a few students at MIT were working on this. with the vr3d engine AFIK.
files were organized as cities on a 3d landscape, files that were not for you (permissions set so you couldnt access them) would run away from your avatar and other file types would quiver, grow, etc...
Directories or cities that were off limits would grow walls as you approached and system files (Like logs would change color depending on errors contained inside.) would change according to what was happening.
I remember seeing this on television back in the early 90's but I cannot find it anywhere on MIT's webservers. anyone know if it's stored in the archives? or maybe moved from MIT?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
These people should really learn that the desktop is the best way to handle a two dimensional computing environment. The only possible ways to make the current computer interface better is to either add new hardware to interact with the computer (3D goggles, hand sensors, microphone, what have you) or to tweak the current desktop interface to make it just a tiny bit better.
These people are trying to reinvent the wheel by making it a square or a triangle. My wheels are fine the way they are, thank you very much.
And yet none of them have taken off. Why's that? Maybe (heretical thought!) it's because the current model actually works quite well for most people.
I don't want a system where the computer organises things for me. I can organise them better myself. (Occasionally I might lose something, but probably less often than if the computer was filing stuff for me. Anyway, we have good 'find' tools on Windows and Unix.)
I don't want a 3-D interface. It's much harder to visualise and navigate than a 2-D one. (A set of 2-D interfaces, as in Mozilla's tabbed browsing or many window managers' virtual desktops, is good. This is perhaps one of the real UI advances in recent years. Windows could do with virtual desktops.)
The article says: "Conceivably, an inference engine can be made so intelligent that [...] machines would automatically present information to you as you need it." Well, maybe when that's true I'll change my mind.
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
My point is that these attempts at deciding the future of GUI are pathetic as they don't even take the current GUI's limitation in consideration:
(Note: if you don't agree with the following then you had to adapt yourself to these. Take anybody who doesn't use computers and just observe him.)
Future GUI concepts should take the problem the reverse way:
I am actually working on a GUI concept which will *not* be 3D. This will be Open Sourced.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
perhaps keep 2d for things we use right now, like reading text, viewing images and movies, and to an extent, file management.
For file management, maybe as was mentioned above, using icons/objects that vary in virtual size with the actual size of the file, maybe with a hyperbolic file manager.
3D will really come in useful in more futuristic applications, mostly dealing with non-local entities... talking to people, viewing data on other servers, etc. I think that entertainment and communication will be the two largest areas to be able to exploit 3D interfaces (that means *with* VR glasses and various sensors and such)
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
"We wanted to find people who didn't understand the function of file folders, how to open files, how to delete files. We couldn't find anyone. That makes it hard to change people's expectations of how computers should behave." - try 3rd world. I know lots of ppl here in Brasil that never saw a computer in their lives and that still fears that a HAL 9000 can someday takeover the world.
But that's not the reason of this post.
the real reason of this post is to say that the solution to the desktop mess may already exist, living right in our POCKETS... yes, I am talking about PalmOS.
Palm os is task oriented. you want to type a text ? fire the text editor. all your texts will be registered as belonging to that app, and will be an inseparable part of it.
Want to draw a picture ? same thing.
The job of organizing files by date, size, content, name, category, etc will be handled by THE APPLICATION, in a way that best matches the type of aplication you're using. Keep in mind that organizing AutoCAD drawings is completelly diferent than organizing texts or bitmap images.
What ? Me, worry ?
They claim that the desktop is dead etc, etc. I'm not so sure. Shit, I swear I saw a picture of MS Bob (enhanced) there, that was weird (the MS gallery interface). Anyone remember the hacked version of that called MS Bubba (trailer park motif, shotguns, malt liquor etc, funny as hell)?
:)
Anyways, I think the problem is this. We all have a shitload of files - on my 100gb drive, I have 85,120 files taking up about 80GB. This is my "extra storage" drive, I got 45,920 files on my C drive. Ok, perhaps I'm extreme, I have a shitload (about 40,000) of text files, books in pdf, etc etc..
Now, how the hell are you going to make it easy for me, or anyone, to access a good 120,000 files, preferably within less than 5 user interactions (clicks, speaking something, etc..)
OK, a new gui, cool, but if it is going to succeed it will essentially be a sytem based on "Organisational units that hold things" i.e. Folders / directories / objects.
A Chronological system won't work for a situation like this, it'd take too much of a mental effort -answer this - what did you have for dinner 1 week ago? I think that would be a perfect question, because things on the computer tend to be "routine" - did I work on this or this? It doesn't take a psyc major to tell you that humans suck at remembering what happened in the past.
With a hierarchical structure, it is painfully easy, and it scales well.
i.e.
e:\asdf (ok, ok, its easy to type and a throw-back to my 286 days, wee didnt have no stinkeen gooey)
e:\asdf\music
e:\asdf\music\Rock
e:\asdf\music\Rock\Prodigy - minefields.mp3
Moreover you can actually communicate the location to someone else, not "a file from sometime last week", or "the file in the Blue gallery on the right wall in the clipboard". Ever try to explain over the phone how to get to your house? Ever get lost becuase the directions sucked?
I can't argue with the article too much though - clippy the annoying mother fucker gets bashed on
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Incidently, I am this }{ close to losing the GUI alltogethor. With the fantastic (but slightly unwiedly)mplayer, and Q3 now working from the CLI, I see little purpose (personally) for those quaint little GUIs.
A mouse is what you play Quake with.
So, others here have noticed that MS just can't lose the Bob metaphor. It was a livingroom, now it's a hallway.
Could it be that Mrs. Gates (former Bob project leader) is using her influence to get a second chance to screw-up?
The article mentions how annoying Clippy is, but says that MS researchers still think a 'helpful' interface is a good idea if done properly. Can anybody think of a good way to do this without it becoming annoying?
One thing that I really hate about those little characters is that they get in the way and take control of the computer away from me. But what if a little box on the task bar showed the three 'most likely' things you wanted to do and you could activate them (complete with little wizards if the task is complex) by clicking?
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
OK, so I use a text console most of the time, easier on the eyes, etc, but when I do use a GUI (one does what one must, when supporting CAD users) I sometimes wish I could zoom windows in or out. You know, use shift-scrollwheel or something to zoom the active window out so it takes up less space, the fonts are smaller, etc, but you can still see it. (Perhaps two modes, one which resizes only the borders as is already possible, the other also zooms the window contents....) This wouldn't replace the 'normal size', 'maximise', and 'minimise' commands, of course - in fact, 'normal size' would be even more useful than it is at present, as it would snap back to normal zoom factor.
Shouldn't be all that hard - scalable fonts were probably the trickiest bit and they've been around a long time now. An application would have the option of scaling or not scaling other elements of a window.
SGI almost did this - many of their IRIX desktop apps let you zoom stuff in and out by dragging a graphical "volume control" thing on the left side of the window. I believe this was primarily their way of showing off their vector-based icons. But this didn't resize the window itself, only its contents. And those were the days before mouse wheels.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Voice interaction is a classic example of something that can be thought of as "cool" until you have an open plan office with 30 people talking at their computers.
I agree about offices, the technology to make voice interfaces work is here today, but the applications is not, however but Voice Interfaces offers a lot of potential for much more personal environments, like the car home & SOHO.
VI offers a number of advantages over conventional interfaces, biomentric security, easy of use & accessability, even for your technophobic mother/granny.
Imagine a home entertainment gateway accessed by voice, no worries about little Johnny snooping your adult PIN. The inherent Biometric security, will make no difference, if he overhears your PIN.
Imagine re-tuning you IP Radio Alarm, by voice, without opening your eyes.
Imagine switching off your security alarm, by saying 'Hello House', and then following up it up with the query "Messages?" without having to log in and remember your password.
Or change channels without having to figure out which of those six seperate remote you need to use, simply by saying 'TV, select channel 4', or 'TV, News' or any number of other scenarios.
I think the killer application for VI is Home Automation.
All the metaphores are about helping the user to perform the actions of storing and retrieving. WOuldn't it be an idea to let the OS handle those things. Wouldn't it be conceiveable to integrate an AI or neural network in the OS that decides how and where to store stuff, and how to retrieve it? The AI would decide on how to store and index the document using keywords and one or more names. Maybe not quite concieveable at the moment, but I think it could work...
I think you are missing the point of the article. Basically, Google does one thing - searches the internet. You only have to type in one box and click one button. So, of course the interface, which is uncluttered and intuitive, works fine. The article is about systems that involve thousands of files, and how to allow humans to manage large amounts of information. You make arguments like people will lose information in a 3D system. Well, people are already losing in formation in their 2D system, so this argument is fairly weak. In fact, being overwhelmed with directories, file systems and storage is exactly what these people are combatting with their research. Our current system is far from effective, and if they can come up with something better, then great. Personally, I find the idea of sitting in front a box and typing to access information to be ludicrous and backward. We should stop trying to perfect the GUI and move on to the next step in computer integration. The fact that you have to take a course to understand how to use a PC indicagtes that our current interpretation of PC'S is failing. You don't have to take a course to use your fridge, and computers need to be that integrated in our lives.
- If This Peace Is Fictious, I Shall Destroy It
Is this one!
Best Slashdot Co
You weren't the only one; there seemed to be some sort of glitch last night.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Anybody remember seeing the movie version of Disclosure?
There was this supposedly state of the art revolutionary 3D Virtual Reality immersive file system they were using (enough mid-90's buzzwords in there for you?)
So anyway, there's Michael Douglas and he's looking for a file. He's on some techno-trampoline with clunky VR goggles on. They show his visual perspective, and he's jogging down what appears to be a library hallway, looking at virtual books on the shelves. After several minutes of jogging he finds the book he wants, selects it from the virtual bookshelf, and opens it to find the file he wants.
That scene always cracked me up. What are these people thinking? We have computers to store information so we don't HAVE to jog down hallways to locate a book.
I'm not saying that the interfaces in the article were nearly as convoluted as that, but researchers keep beating up on the desktop for no apparently good reason. People make all kinds of emotional claims about how much the desktop sucks, but every system that gets proposed (for example, this weird-ass filecard system) appear to suck more.
Whatever. As long as I can still get to a command prompt, I'll live.
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
However, the file-cabinet view of the desktop have lots of nice alternatives. I really want a system that treats my desktop like a giant mind-map. Every project that I work on, and all the little notes that I find myself writing all the time would fit great in a mindmap structure. Also having the entire map in a zoomable format would be a better way to use the background than just putting the standard Manga/Astronomy/Softcore/Whatever-floats-your-boat pic there.
Furthermore such a desktop would interface nicely with remembrance agents. Imagine having an interactive system (perhaps integrated in emacs, like the one in MIT) that monitors what you write and suggests related nodes, that you have written before.
And it doesn't stop there! If you have a little checkbox for 'public' on each node/note, a mindmap maps well to a html-site (like MindMan does), so you could easily transform a set of loose thoughts on a subject to something that the entire world can benefit from. The RA could perhaps also interface with something like Everything and the mindmap desktop could have an easy function for uploading nodes/groups of nodes to the community. The entire hivemind of such a network would have an enormous potential.
Got interesting incoming mail? Tag it with a few keywords and give it a place in the hierarchy and the RA will pop it up when you need it again. The mindmap structure is immensely powerful. Got a whole slew of files in a programming project? Using the same system as you do for all the rest of your documents, you could easily arrange them so as to get a nice visual overview of their interdependence.
Can you tell that I've been thinking about implementing a desktop (probably in scheme for that schweet scriptability) that does something like this, for a while? ;)
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
In the end, the only way any of these are going to replace the desktop metaphor is if they can be shown to be better then the desktop. All of these fail at that task.
Although the idea of chronological storage is intriguing, and will work well for small groups of files, it breaks down completely once the user starts manipulating many files. This can be mitigated by storing them hierarchically, but this then ceases to offer much advantage over a desktop list view that's sorted reverse-chronologically by date.
3-D has two main disadvantages, both stemming from this notion of "space" as a way of managing files, as opposed to a flat "surface". The first is speed. Because there is more area (or, to be more accurate, volume) to navigate, the user has to spend more time looking for stuff. Second, as the article points out, things become easier to lose in 3-D space. You can alleviate some of this if you add the notion of "hallways" and "rooms" in which to organize things, but if you do, then you're still thinking in hierarchical terms, and that puts you right back on the Desktop.
Then, there's that funky sphere idea. Somewhat less of a problem than true 3-D, because you're still dealing with only one surface rather than a space Less easy to lose things. However, with all the spinning and zooming that you'd need to do, you lose speed, big time.
Microsoft's task-oriented stuff just doesn't work out. It's well-suited to carrying out actions, but not for organizing files. You just get dumped onto the Desktop.
It's true that the desktop metaphor has its flaws. In fact, truth be told, it's pretty bad. But it's like democracy in that regard: the only thing worse is everything else we've come up with so far.
Then apple bought NEXT...
But the interface lives on as "Afterstep"!!
Long live Afterstep (untill something better comes along...)
3D may be the next dimension to graphic designers, but has nothing to do with file organization and structure.
Currently, disk contents are arranged in a nested heirarchy. This fits nicely into a desktop-folder-file metaphor. Each file may be enclosed in one folder (which may be enclosed in more folders) which is contained by the desktop. A 1-1-...-1 relationship. Aliases are currently used to sidestep this structure and randomly access files outside of this struture.
It seems to me the next step is a relational file system. In this system, the physical location of a file is mostly irrelevant. Just like in a relational database, all files may be displayed by search criteria. An OS would have default views which would show "all user created data", "all system applications", etc. Each view is merely a database report which could be further refined.
A XML-ish standard structure for embedding attributes about each file (metadata) would be very useful. File type, creator, preferred editor, preferred viewer, and other user defined attributes, as well as some content-based indexing would make this possible. Users could have their own file system views based on search criteria of file attributes. It would then be trivial to view "all html documents containing meeting notes from last week" (files matching 3 attributes).
Files would no longer merely be viewable by heirarchial location, although you could still view by directory structure for maintenance, housekeeping, and organization.
Window management is another big deal I'd like to resolve. Layering of windows places the burden of managing the display on the user. Why can't my OS handle much of that for me?
I applied at Apple for a senior UI design position several years prior to OSX , presented many of these ideas in the interview, and was told, in essence, they were more interested in animated widgets than reinventing the desktop. Now Apple has undermined use of metadata in OSX. It's sad to see a company once so keen in user interface to take a step backward, instead of some forward direction.
It's also sad to read about such crap as in this article being presented as the next step. Geesh. What a maroon! I've been hearing about 3D interfaces since at least 1990 and have yet to see one with any promise. At best they are eye candy. At worst, they are a counter-intuitive kludge from forcing a concept onto functional need. (Ahem. It flows the other way, fellas...)
-c!
"You have liberated me from thought."
When I write something in a notebook I don't have to "save" it, or give a special name etc.
For example, I've used a wordprocessor, called "YeahWrite", that does away with files. You simply open new pages and write. Everything is automatically saved and you pages are arranged in time order. This works great for people who are not computer expersts and are not interested in learning about computers.
In "The Humane Interface" Jef Raskin describes an interface that's based on plain text. There are no documents, just one big text stream that contains separators. The user interface just manipulates this text.
Finally, do these usibility experts actually watch people work? One of the most useful UI features is the idea of "Virtual Screens" (as implemented by Unix window managers). Each virtual screen keeps the context of a particular task and makes it easy for me to switch between them. Why hasn't this become a standard feature of Windows is beyond me!?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
After messing around with firewalls all day, I wonder if something like PSDoom could take some of the drudgery out of that...
Picture this:
You've got a large stone wall with ~65,000 entrances, a machine gun, boiling oil and a six-pack of beer.
Sounds like a lot more fun than how I spent the last few days...
When you get a really solid firewall going, you can pick off valid packets just for fun...
-- My Weblog.
Basically, the user interface really isn't that important. The main problem, as I see it, is that heirarchical data storage just doesn't work for most _people_.
This is especially obvious to anyone who's worked in teams of more than, ooh, one person who have had to share a single file structure. What one person perceives as a logical structure (/docs/reports/outgoing/date) another would view as being totally redundant (/docs/date/out/reports). You end up with a compromise that suits neither party, and by the time you move up to >100 people sharing a file structure you're in real trouble...
You also get into real trouble when a document has to exist in more than one place within the heirarchy. F'rinstance documents that need to be organised by Date or by Customer or by Author or by Cost code etc etc.
Shortcuts and/or logical links can help some of these problems, but they're both pretty messy solutions.
I have seen, and worked with, several database driven document management systems which show a lot of promise. Whether this is the way forward is a debatable point, certainly having to host a database complicates the implementation for the average desktop user.
Until some form of document management can be incorporated into the operating system all that a new GUI can do is to further obscure the core organisation.
What I want is a document management system which allows me to look at my files in the way that I choose, allows my co-workers to look at the same files in the way that they choose and hides the files completely from people who have no interest in them. The organisation of the files on disk shouldn't be something that I (as a user) have to even care about - slap them in a flat structure for all I care.
Fer [insert deity here] sake, if we were designing a file system from the ground up we wouldn't seriously contemplate a heirarchical model for more than five minutes. There must be a better way!
Cheers
Chris
You're not wrong. However, we must also remember that fridges don't take a minute to turn the light on and let you have access to your foodstuffs. You could reply that fridges are on the whole time, but if you leave the PC on the whole time, who pays the electricity bill? /bad thing/.
PC/human interaction is vastly different from real-world physical interactions in many ways. Trying to force them into being analogous is often a
The future lies in places like the Xerox PARC of old, and in usability labs, where people can simply brainstorm interface ideas, and fitness/evolution will take care of the rest.
Note, however, that there _isn't_ a single solution. People have many different prefered ways of arranging data not just in their head, but externally too.
THL.
Keeping
If you think my computer's desktop is a mess, you should see the real desk that my computer is sitting on!
In fact, my desktop's backdrop image is a picture piles of paper, magazines, and coffee rings... it's a photo of my desk.
Hmmm.... time for that spring-cleaning I keep procrastinating about...
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Does anyone remember Microsoft BOB? It was an ill-fated attempt to hide the complexity of the OS behind a silly front-end.
And then there was that insane navigation screen used in Jurassic Park. The girl managed to use it easily enough in the movie, but it didn't look like the easiest system in the world.
In short - there have been plenty of attempts to come up with something better than the desktop, but although they're all very pretty and innovative, most of them have been pretty useless to actually use.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
All this research seems to want to throw away the desktop paradigm because it is just old, and computers can do so much more now. It seems less attention is given to how people use computers than what the computers can do. The current desktop paradigm is good, with virtual and multiple desktops, you can group information as you see fit. You don't need to use a clunky, harder to navigate 3D interface to do this same thing. The 3D paradigm has great benefit to games/simulation where you actually *want* to take the extra time to explore the environment. When you are just trying to get work done, 2D is much easier to see and wrap our heads around. Just like in real life, when we play, we do so in 3D, when working, we sit down at a desk and lay everything out in 2D. There is a reason why, for example, more people paint than work in plaster. As far as these other paradigms, they seem to be all about deciding for the user what the user wants to see and how he wants what he sees to be organized. This is a very bad mode of operation, people are intelligent enough to know what they do and do not want to see, and how to organize it. No matter what algorithm you use to guess what the user wants, it will never be 100% accurate, so just provide convenient access to everything, and be flexible enough to let the user modify it as he sees fit. Just because a concept is old, does not mean that it should be completely scrapped. This is a bad tendency that computer research people have, and they need to come to reality sometimes...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The article claims that the desktop metaphor was designed for the age when computers consisted of no hard drive and only a floppy drive to run the system. I can't see how this is really true. Apple's Macintosh, from the very beginning, allowed folders to be nested inside folders, allowing an infinite amount of scalability -- something that Windows 3.1 didn't offer at the time. It's clear that the Mac OS was intended to scale to large numbers of files and folders, and allowed the user to customize how they wanted things organized. It worked well, and still works, because many many people are STILL coming to computers from a non-computing environment, and need that kind of simple familiarity.
Of the options listed in the article, Scopeware is the only one that looks remotely intuitive to me -- and that's only because it's basically a search engine for your computer. Call it a diary metaphor all you like, but it's basically a combination of two things: the "Recent Documents" history that my browser uses, and a database-driven search engine that indexes every document as I create or modify it. Sounds a lot like my web browser to me. Nothing too revolutionary there, it seems to me.
Why does there have to be one prevailing 'metaphor'? Why can't we use metaphors specific to the task? I mean, I really like using the command line for a lot of things, but at the same time, I'd like to see thumbnails of images in my directory listings... XML-term is great for this - it merges command line and gui (although not very smoothly yet). Also, 3d works for some things, as does aural; but not for many other things. Use the right tool for the job, not the most cool.
There was a fair amount of GUI experimentation
in the early 1980s. However as much I admire
Apple in bringing the Desktop metaphor (developed at Xerox) to the masses, it had the counter effect of freezing this metaphor. Especially when MicroSoft with the inventive creativity of a dead fish copied it and put it on every desktop.
The evolution of the desktop interface is multidimensional, but not in the 3D + voice sense. The additional dimensions are time and social context. A truly discursive interface is more closely matched to the human user's cognitive habilities. Naïve users intuitively keep attachments with their messages in Oultook instead of saving them to the filesystem : what they are doing is actually conserving contextual information. An look at all the weblogs : this is only information storage, but with emphasis on context. The diary metaphor, not glitter and glitz is what will pull the desktop interface toward the future.
1) Finding files is easy. Period. It's easy to find files as long as you put them in a logical place. If you don't put your files in a folder/directory that makes sense to you, no OS can help you be organized and efficient. DOS/Windoze (I am not very familiar with *nix) does this - you can put all your work documents in c:\work, or in c:\my documents\work etc. Or you can put all your Word files in c:\program files\msword etc. if that's what makes sense to you.
2) *Hiding* files is also easy. If your workstation/home PC is not secure, it's dead easy to conceal your {warez/pr0n/job application letters to competing companies} from your {significant other/boss} by burying them in a folder where nobody would think to look for them (eg. "c:\program files\the microsoft network\setup files"). I know that "security through obscurity" doesn't really work, but I suspect this system works very well for many thousands of people.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Whenever I hear someone* declare something to be dead, it's a good indication that it'll be around for another hundred years or so. Yeah, the desktop metaphor is dead, just like paper is dead.
* Someone refers to the researcher who's inevitably researching what he thinks will supercede what he's declaring dead.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Just read a couple of White Papers from software vendors - next version is always announced as supporting "Read My Mind Computing"
Plus, will all the cool effects of windows zooming on to the screen (this is a new one), and windows zooming off the screen, I the interface looks bad-ass and I look productive.
Hehe, fooled them didn't I?
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
There are two aspect to the desktop metaphor: the overlaying of documents on the window (very good -- we should keep this), and the hierarchical storage of documents (very weak). The hierarchical storage of documents is precisely how you are not supposed to handle physical files. Physical files are supposed to be organized one of two ways: chronologically or alphabetically. There is a one to one correspodence between hanging folders and inside folders which immediately tells you whether a file is missing. Files are never ever nested. This is a kind of discipline which is imposed to make filing systems comprehensible between people; they also reflect physical limitations (a file can't be in two places at once; a file can refer to another file but won't necessarily help you find it).
The very image of "files" being stored in a "tree" is so incongrous it is funny.
The storage of files in an unique tree shaped hieararchy is itself a metaphor; we all know that on disk storage looks nothing like this, but we accept the hiearchical structure unhesitatingly. This is an obstacle in people cooperating with each other, except when certain hiearchies are so engrained they are second nature (e.g.
I think a good system would allow users to do the following (concepts poorly supported currently are italicized):
The more I think of it, the better it would be to organize files around the needs of project and task management. I was going to add above things like "prioritize" files because people often do -- segregate their "hot" files from the rest. However , this doesn't really make sense. It's a task that is priortized; when that task is back burnered, then all the files associated with that task lose their hot status. In a sense, this complements a post I made earlier in an article about "groupware". Groupware shouldn't just be e-mail or e-mail and calendaring. It should be about managing the flow of information between people. In some sense the same things are needed by an indivdual working alone. The big problem is that they way I think about things (and how they need to be organized) may change as I change my focus between tasks, or as I change my thinking over time.
I think a system that supports these kinds of tasks could be done with a special shell or even a web client, with metadata stored in hidden files or in a database. Ideally, we would have a file system with extensible and well indexed metadata, version tracking and cryptographic signatures.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There are just so many things wrong with this statement... Do you want "radically different interfaces" just for the sake of being different, or do you want them to be functional too? And of course, "radically different" and "widespread acceptance" very rarely go together. Most people accept what is familiar, so none of these new interfaces are going to take off overnight. While we're at it though, why don't we have radically different automobile interfaces, or radically different food packaging interfaces, or radically different building access interfaces?
The whole point of an interface is that it is accessible. The key here is to make it work for the users and not make the users work for it. When you start having the interface share some of the work of organizing files (as Scopeware does), you may take some work away from the user, but now you've essentially got a co-worker you need to deal with whenever you want a file. Imagine two people sharing a cubicle (yes, this is a desktop metaphor for a non-desktop metaphor replacing a desktop metaphor), using the same files and reference materials. Even if one is only tasked with organizing everything, there's still a gap between the brain of the user and the brain of the organizer. If there isn't a perfect match between how the two think, you'll hit an endless cycle of problems. The only solution is to either force the user to conform to the organizer, or customize the organizer to the exact specifications of the user. Neither is likely to be better than just giving the user the task of organizer.
All of these nifty high-tech interfaces may be fun to play with and may succeed at getting funding, but their final test is always the typical user. Now, I know the typical user is held in low regard around here (we are the elite after all, or at least we like to think we are), but at some point you have to interact with reality. The desktop metaphor just won't die for a reason - people can use it. As an IBM researcher said in the article, "We wanted to find people who didn't understand the function of file folders, how to open files, how to delete files. We couldn't find anyone." Throw some weird abstract 3-D creation at people, and some won't understand. A lot of people can't even handle the concept of multiple ways of completing a given task; increasing the complexity of the interface would actually make things more difficult for them.
The real solution to this problem won't come from the interface side - it will come from the user side. You can't design an interface until you can understand what the user wants to do. This may not be as attractive a project for venture capital, but reality seldom is. In the end, I have a feeling that there will be no general agreements between users, making a single unified advanced interface impractical.
Yet again, the solution is on the user end. The desktop metaphor is a lot more useful than many people give it credit for. For example, the paragraph describing Scopeware really describes a generic file search program that already works perfectly well in a desktop metaphor. However, expanding it to fill the entire GUI is pointless. If you want to be able to find something, just put it somewhere that makes sense. In a year or two, will you really remember what day, or even what month you last used a certain file? If you file it away in a logical place though, you can use that same logic to locate the file again. Instead of file-specific knowledge, all you need to know is how you think. Sure this requires you to think in the first place, but that is the key issue here. In any interface, usefulness will be determined by how well files are maintained by the user. The current desktop metaphor requires very little from the user, just moving files around. Linked interfaces or fancy 3-D interfaces require more from the user, otherwise there will be no benefits - you still have to create the links or move files around spatially. If managing a system of files and folders is too much work for some people, will these new interfaces be any better?
So for those of you who survived this entire comment, I will sum up how to improve the computer interface for the masses. Teach them how to get the most out of the existing interface, based on their individual needs. Learn where they run into problems caused by the interface. Refine the interface to the point where the user is truly in control and isn't restricted by how the interface thinks things should be done - leave the thinking to the humans. We don't need any fancy interfaces on a general purpose computer. And yes Apple, that means cut it out with all the prettying up/cluttering up of the GUI. Just make it work and leave it alone.
I can't wait for the day when I, as a misunderstood hacker, can get in front of some super-villian's computer and say "ahh. This is Unix based!" and start virtually flying around the "city" of databases, looking for the right window to break into.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
In that context, 3D and a voice interface both make sense.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
thats why single-use appliances will take off instead of the current model of "its a computer, it can do ANYTHING you want".
... hi bingo
I am wondering if there's a really good explination of why the desktop metaphor is, to borrow a phrase from "1984", un-good.
This is only my opinion, but...
oh, i thought it said the NeXT interface. nevermind.
honestly, though, it would be really nice when some of the mainstream OSes adopt the option to use alternative file browsers, whether for the cutting edge geeks to see their files as quake maps, or for more specialized users to see things as they are more properly arranged, or, and this is where i think the research ought to be going, handicapped users being able to "see" their data in ways that are more appropriate for those without certain assumed abilities.
the real "next interface" will be here when there is an interface that a blind user can use to browse his hard drive as fast or faster than a sighted person can use the current stock of file browsers - instead of using some kludgy add-on or adaptive technology working with a file browser built for a sighted person.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Heh heh. I noticed that too. Too bad I can't really claim credit for my sig :-).
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
1) What difference does it make how you represent a heirarchical filesystem and its contents? Zippo. Infact, organizing them by document and folder is probably the most condusive way to go, since most people arent like us. The rest of the world thinks in real world terms. Only programmers are accustomed to thinking about such things in highly abstract terms. Grandma shouldn't need to develop a mental picture of a binary search tree in order to find her cookie recipe. The desktop metaphor is boring in most implementations, yes, but its certainly not dead
2) 3D interfaces are rediculous. Take the screenshot that accompanies the article -- Three desktops are presented to the user in the form of a room, with a screen on each wall. What the hell difference does it make if they're on the walls? Youre STILL USING a flat, two dimensional surface to interact with! And so long as you're still using a flat, two dimensional space to interact with, representing them in 3D is pointless. Workspaces need to follow a design similar to channels on a television. You'll notice that your living room has one TV in it, capable of displaying hundreds of different workspaces. You don't have hundreds of TVs mounted all over your walls, each tuned to a different channel. 3D workspaces may have a future, but as a modus to display was essentially amounts to a 2D workspace floating in a 3D scene, they are beyond pointless. They're ridiculous. As in, its ridiculous to improve the design of UIs by "pulling a CueCat." You're inventing a tool to solve a problem that doesn't exist by pushing "2D in 3D" interfaces.
3) The 2D GUI isnt dead. It just needs refinement and rationality in its design. Speaking of irrational and unrefined ideas, take your common everyday scrollbar. You have a device (a mouse) capable of smoothly vectoring along a curved path, and communicating that movement to the computer. However, your damn UI still wants to alter your view of a workspace or document according to explicit X or Y axes. You can scroll up and down, OR, you can scroll left and right.. But never both, an act which would be far more intuitive to the common user. It takes fine adjustment of two separate widgets (a vertical and horizontal scrollbar) to accomplish a task that could be easilly encompassed within one...while wasting a disproportionately large amount of screen real estate in the process. So, rather than whine about it, I decided to do something about it a few years back.
Scrollbars are dead, and we killed them. Been working with someone for the past week or so on (finally) delivering a proof of concept model for the infamous "scrollball" whitepaper I released 3 years ago after InSight collapsed. The model looks fantastic so far (hi Dibos!) and will probably be dumped on Savannah or Freshmeat in a week or so once we fumigate the code to drive the last of the bugs out.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
..Another interface model.
Most programmers can't program GUI worth a damn to begin with, now we want to make it more complicated? please.
I can think of sverel model that are technically superiour, but they would fail in the real world when other programmer started writting apps for them, because they would not adhere to standards.
which they woiuld claim wasn't there fault because they didn't know there where standards.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I can sympathize with users who are overwhelmed with the abundance of information that they are fed each day. I have four interfaces that I use on a daily basis, each of which was declared 'dead' by a new technology. I read the newspaper while I eat my breakfast, I listen to the radio on my way to work, I use my computer when I get to work, I do research at home by browsing the web, and I watch my television for infotainment.
No one has proposed eliminating my car radio in any meaningful way. In fact, during the dot com rush, the radio was supposed to be replaced by a satellite fed computer that would do essentially the same thing - stream content. Why change what something that already worked fine *without* a satellite?
I was also supposed to tank my televison for a computer that would play mp3s, surf the web, stream video, and cook my dinner. Why change that interface when all I want to do is watch "6 Feet Under" or "The Sopranos"?
I like the systems the way they operate now. If the researchers were to study how people conduct their daily lives, they might learn that humans use a variety of interfaces to gather information. To use the metaphor of Gelernter, these people seem to be armed with a hammer and view every information problem as a nail.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Take a second look at the screenshot of the Microsoft desktop -- even they get bitten by their own stupid extensions to the Latin-1 character set ("can?t", "they?re", "don?t").
"Smart quotes". Not.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
The problem isn't the desktop metaphor at all--it's that we're trying to use our personal computers for tasks they weren't meant to perform. Peel those tasks away to specialized devices--music to MP3 players, films to movie players, news and information to specialized readers--and you've solved the desktop metaphor problem. Each device will evolve its own best interface, depending on its specialized use.
I can't really see how this person is supposed to be seen as 'forward-thinking'. I mean, just how many various failed 'appliances' have we seen offered at discount/clearout, with X number of Linux hacks in recent months? For the current time, appliances have been tried and have been found wanting.
Another snippit: ;)
You could verbally ask your Web browser to go to CNN Online. While you're there, the browser might observe where you look on the page and offer pages with related content for viewing--in theory making it virtually effortless to get what you want from your computer at all times without having to stop at the desktop.And at the same time, make it virtually effortless to get what we don't want. You think pop-ups are bad now, imagine it they did things if you just look at the buggers ("the user is looking at the icon, therefor he/she has an interest in the product!"). Only one good thing I could see from it: the replacement for click-through banner ads. Advertising is for getting the attention of the consumer, in getting the company's/product's name/image/whatever out there for people to look at (think billboards, magazine/newspaper spreads, television spots, they don't require any action comparable to a banner ad 'click-through'). Just imagine what would happen to all those companies if they had to pay site owners 'per eye view' of their ads, for the site owner renting out part of their space for the ad.
My Big Brother can beat up your Big Brother any day!
There's no wrong way, to eat a Rhesus...
I'm not arguing that VI is without issues, what technology isn't ? However there are protocol and technological solutions to this type of security issue.
A Protocol based solution, might require you to complete a challenge, i.e.
Computer say 'Blue' You say 'Sky'
Computer says 'Red' You say 'October'
It could require you to name the content.
It is also possible to distigush natural voice from even high quality recordings, in the same way you can tell the difference between a CD and a live performance/gig.
I don't understand slashdotters sometimes.
Have you ever been in a callcentre? Okay, they're generally not exactly open plan, but they don't give the drones huge walls, and there's way more than 30 of them in there.
What they do give the drones are headset mics.
This isn't rocket science, folks. Kate Bush, not exactly a hardcore techie, came up with wireless mics in the '70s (well okay she forced her engineer boyfriend to come up with them, but you know how it goes :)
Wireless headsets. That's how you do voice recognition in an office.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Clippy wouldn't be nearly so annoying if it didn't pop up when it wasn't wanted, and if Microsoft hadn't jettisoned creating real documentation when they implemented it. A decent manmade TOC and index is always going to be more useful than an automated wildass guess as to what you want.
Instead of using up valuable screen real estate, though, I'd make it an ever-present part of the right-click menu.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
The Windows Icons Menus and Programs metaphor has been so successful for the past thirty years because it has such a resonance with the actual internal workings of any multitasking computer.
Each thread has a different window, each file has a seperate icon, etc. There is really not much one can do to improve the metaphor without changing the operating system.
Object oriented filesystems would make content-based retrieval and end-user programming a little easier. You could build a "class" of presentations for various data, and "instances" would be special folder structures with "buttons" or menus on the "browser" to initiate various actions, for example.
Escaping from a windowed interface would actually be a step backwards, as it stands now. Escaping from the Windows User's "No, really, Microsoft invented computing" mindset might help, but that is a slow progression at best.
The best solution using existing technology would be something like X11. Imagine Xwindows, only where your Windowmaker GUI has only Windowmaker widgets, look and feel, and your GNOME GUI has only GNOME widgets, look and feel, even if you're using applications from different GUI interfaces.
While it is nice to say the WIMP metaphor is dead, it is a LOT safer to say there are a lot of well-established implementations of the WIMP GUI that are on their way out, because of pressures from the unwashed masses.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
OK, maybe it's my inner German getting out, but really in situations like this what you need is to set some basic ground rules in place at the beginning and make people stick by them.
So you decide on a few basic rules and STICK TO THEM. Ex: doc directories organized by workgroup, project, release version, type of document, and containing the date in the file name. Otherwise, you quickly get chaos, which people try to fix with search engines, and you wind up with Microsoft.com.
For a search engine approach to ever work, you have to have the system of organization in place first BEFORE the documents are created, so that people can tag the docs with the right search terms so that people can find them later on.
This is why you can find things in libraries or, to a lesser extent, on USENET. There is a system in place that makes at least some sense, and forces people to categorize docs as they are created (or as they enter the system from outside).
You can't throw the docs in an unorganized pile and have your computer magically make sense of it, since your computer CANNOT READ FOR CONTENT. Word searches don't work if the keywords appear in every document (see microsoft.com). You can have people go in afterwards and read for content and tag for organization, but that's a losing battle, because the doc specialists are always outnumbered 10 to 1 or worse, and the docs are constantly changing and being replaced.
Putting everything into a database without figuring out a working system of organization only makes things worse, because not only are the docs still unorganized, they're also hidden away from the user and "owned" by whoever is maintaining the database, and that person is probably a DBA, not a librarian. Even if they are a librarian, you still have the problem that they're outnumbered 100 to 1 and didn't create the docs. Plus, this approach tends to give you lots of smaller databases that can't be searched globally. And, it's much more expensive and more prone to breakage than the original document directories were.
The same document should NEVER be stored in more than one place, or else how do you know which copy is the most up to date? I would accept having more than one way to find a document as being a good thing, though, as long as the underlying organizational structure is put in place first, and both ways to find the document actually WORK. Two broken search engines are not the equivalent of one good hierarchy, IMHO.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Now look here, the thing is that a well structured hierarchy, with well-organised use of symbolic links for objects that fall into multiple catgories, is a great way to organise things.
Of course, full metadata would be nicer, but that's not gonna happen, because people are lazy.
What's really needed is a desktop tool for managing one's workspace hierarchically, with transparent management of symbolic links.
Konqueror comes close to what I'm thinking about here, the way when you drag a file to a different folder, it will politely ask you whether you want to Copy, Move or Link To the original file. THIS KICKS ASS.
However, what is really needed is something that will assist the user in maintaining referential integrity in the links. Anyone know of anything like that?
NO TOUCH MONKEY!