Tactile the Future of GUI?

aaronvegh writes "Slashdot readers have been griping a lot lately about the lack of an alternative to the desktop GUI. In his latest Alertbox column, Jakob Nielson (love him or hate him) is proposing that tactile, phsyical interfaces will be the next evolution in how we interact with machines. An interesting read, and a relief from the tired "the desktop GUI is dead, and we'll replace it with....uh....""

Comments

What is broken with the Desktop idea?

[nrjyzerbuny]

I see nothing in this article that shows what exactly a physical paradigm would do better than a desktop one. Truthfully, I don't think desktop when I'm on a box, it's just hierarchically organized folders. Which makes alot of sense to me.

Re:Jesus CHRIST

[ceejayoz]

GUIs don't have to be flashy - they have to be functional. Whilst his site isn't particularly cool/pretty/fun/flashy looking, it works just fine.

Does seem to be the general trend, though... there was a /. article a little while back about how GUIs have stagnated... but the article was like dark green background with light green text. Ick.

Mouse: an often overlooked issue

[the bluebrain]

concerning mice: using a mouse is terribly inefficient. The only thing it has going for it is that it is universal. I can use it to point (badly), draw (badly), write (very badly) - just about anything in 2-D.

However, when I watch myself aim for instance for that 5mm x 20mm area in most apps that says "File", I realise that fast as it is, it actually represents an effort - it requires appreciable hand-eye coordination. This is not really a problem (at least not for me), but it is an unnecessary annoyance - it should be effortless. It's also the reason I learn about 20+ keyboard shortcuts as soon as possible for every app I know I'm going to be using 2+ times a week. I always Alt-Tab through my apps on Windows, and if I want to see the running apps, I unhide the autohidden startbar with the Windows key, rather than the mouse.
My favourite apps are the ones where I don't have the touch the mouse at all. Although there are some exceptions: mouse gestures in Opera are great, mainly because they require hardly any hand-eye coordination - the pointer just has to be somewhere in the window I want to do something with. Same with wheeled mice - successful, because it requires far less effort putting the pointer somewhere in a windows and "wheeling" up/down, rather than aiming for the proper section of a 5 mm scrollbar.

Having said all that - this is just one element of modern GUIs, notably interesting because it's both so successful and so bad.