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Alternatives to Icons and Start Menus?
Cibressus Lybir asks: "We've had icons, folders and menu's for a long time. I currently use two monitors, both filled to the brim with icons and several drawers on each desktop. My Start Menu, on my Windows machine is never used, because it's flimsy and too hard to navigate around. In movies you always see cool 3D desktops with stuff flying around and some kind of cool gesture or spoken word used to start up applications. The future will only bring more applications, more icons, and more time spent navigating around launching your programs. What are your ideas for the future of desktops? How can we rid our selves of the icon jungles that we call our GUI's?"
Just how many different apps do you really use on a day to say basis? If you have an icon jungle on your desktop/start menu its your fault.
Make folders, taking advantage of the hierarchical filesystem. Put things you use very often on the quicklaunch . I have "Show Desktop", IE, K++ Kazaa, Firebird, and Winamp.
On my actual desktop I have the standard windows icons, links to games I'm currently playing, and development tools I'm currently using. I hardly ever even use the Start Menu.
Believe it or not, aside from all the eye candy, there isnt anything inherently better about a 3D desktop environment. A lot of people have difficulty reasoning in 3D you know.
There's a reason why we've been "stuck" with 2D since forever, it works, and if its not broken, dont fix it. Backwards compatibility is essential for usability, so more often than not "innovation" in the field of user interfaces is actually a no-no.
Have an output-only connector implanted in the brain (make it one-way wireless and have it run on body heat, perhaps); remembering or thinking of opening an application or document will cause the computer to launch the appropriate application. Output is still put onto a screen (or holographic projecter...) so that input (and thus the capability of "hacking" the human mind) is that much more difficult.
Or, failing that, the system used in Minority Report would be good. I liked the hands- and gestures-based management of the computer, recalling data, literally shoving it aside, calling up the needed information/documents/applications through hand gestures... it'd be nice, and much more intuitive than the current desktop and directory interface we have nowadays.
~UP
Eat the Path.
The problem I and probably many other people have with the Windows Start button is that it just pops up a list of (almost) all of your installed programs. While I do fancy the alphebetical organization for quickly finding programs, it takes a second to get your bearings.
KDE and some other window managers organize applications by their function. This probably won't save you time when you know exactly what program you're looking for, but it can be helpful if you are looking for say, a midi player, but you don't know what its called. It also saves the confusion of having your whole screen fill up with application names at once.
As far as new age 3D menus go, I don't think that they'll end up saving you time. It may look cool in movies, but thats because its not exciting to watch a movie hacker sit in front of some xterms for an hour hacking, while it is exiting to watch them blast through firewalls using cyber missles. I think that the best advance will be better voice recognition. Even now, it probably wouldn't be too hard to patch together a system that could respond to "Computer, Open Office" (You decide whether thats Open office, or OpenOffice.)
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Text-based interfaces are far superior to graphical interfaces when it comes to many tasks. If I want to open a file with a program, the best way might be dragging the file icon onto the program icon. But what if I want to do some task a thousand times? Batch scripts :-)
The problem with text interfaces is, besides being clumsy for simple or inherently graphically oriented tasks, that they're tedious to learn. Not everybody is willing to learn a programming or command language. People want to use their intuition and learn as they go, not RTFM, and that is only likely to work if they are able to work with their visual sense.
Yeah- what I want is a way to have a run command line show permanently in my taskbar the way the new google deskbar does, and have the full functionallity of the Litestep command bar, or work like the great address bar / command line in the wonderful explorer alternative: Xplorer2 . That would make using Windows so much faster.