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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?"
I currently use two monitors, both filled to the brim with icons and several drawers on each desktop.
How on earth do you get any work done with all that clutter?
Call me a minimalist, but I like my desktop clean when it's not filled with programs that I'm currently using. I would totally hate having things zoom around in 3D. Too distracting.
But then again, I know what's on my computer, and what programs I want to run, and when. YMMV.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
More and more often, I start programs with start-run. Then I type the name of the program to run it (or drop to DOS, change directory, and fire the program from within DOS).
The installs of programs tend to splatter the desktop with icons. The start menu is even worse, with most programs giving themselves a mess of icons, so when you try to run it, there is too much chance of clicking the Uninstall icon by mistake. Bypassing the GUI sometimes is a lot more efficient.
This especially becomes apparent if you are doing similar/identical tasks on different machines. This is where the GUI fails as a way just to run apps. The desktops and start menus between two machines are typically very different from each other.
There is always Windows Explorer, but it is slow to load and unintuitive: I can have a Windows app fired from within DOS by the time I am halfway through the tedious navigation process "squint and click and wait and find stuff that has moved since the last time I looked" in Windows Explorer.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
(Playing along that the statement isn't a wild exaggeration): What a horrible future that would be! As it stands, I think that many people only manually run a small subset of programs installed on their computer, and possess extraordinarily poor organizational skills.
(1) small subset of programs
I doubt that the vast majority of the public uses Adobe's Acrobat Reader with such frequency as to warrant putting an application shortcut on the computer's desktop. Same with Winamp, with it's dual quicklaunch and desktop shortcuts. In fact, many programs install multiple ways of running the program, but it invariably includes the desktop. This includes applications that are only used as viewers and players, such as QuickTime (what college student actually runs the application and browses to the file instead of double-clicking on the file in the first place?).
(2) poor organizational skills
My Physics professor's desktop is overflowing with application shortcuts and URL shortcuts. Worse, he stores documents on the desktop! And so do a number of people I know. With the people I've had contact with, this is invariably a sign of a lack of organizational skill: they'd rather not have to deal with understanding how their files are stored. Thus, for internet downloads, they just click on the up arrow until they've found the Desktop, and then save the file there. For Corel Wordperfect, they just save it in My Documents, which eventually becomes a 2-foot-deep ocean of documents.
Thus, I don't think that the desktop has to be the ugly mess that it usually ends up as. I think it's a fundamental weakness of the users, not the system.
And good heavens, a 3-dimensionally navigable filesystem?! Didn't you see Jurassic Park? It takes like 5 excrutiatingly long, edge-of-your-seat minutes to get to anything! Like that door lock! No thanks, I rather use Bash and tab-completion. No velociraptors for me, thanks.
Ahhhh! It's the user's fault. They would get rated 'Insightful' here!
I think what the original poster was looking for was some innovative new organizational strategy, possibly based on a paradigm other than what computers currently offer. I doubt such a thing has been invented, or it would have been all over the news.
The major players (Microsoft, Apple, etc) seem to be tuning old features such as document searching and retooling interface issues with our current set of widgets (Mac OS 10.3 has yet another way to navigate a hierarchy).
If anyone has seen any truly innovative ideas, feel free to share... or we could just make fun of the messy guy.
Computer monitors make "interfacing" with a computer far less engrossing, immersive, and enjoyable than it could be. I don't want to use just 20% of my visual field to absorb, manipulate, and express information. I want to be immersed in the computer environment. It boggles my mind that 3D gamers haven't started demanding nice head mounted displays. The technology exists for a display that wraps around to use your total visual field, and such a display would be amazing for games and all computing. On a less revolutionary note: I think a 3D desktop does work. For example if you ever tried out a 3D chat environment such as activeworlds.com it is very cool. You can be walking around town and click on billboards and signs to open web pages or teleport to new worlds. Using a 3D world to organize information is very compelling in my opinion.
www.wisdomproject.net The open source think tank.
I would love this....
I have always hoped for something that melded the commandline and the GUI such that I could select a bunch of files and then type a command against them at a command line.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Surprised nobody had mentioned this one yet...
www.lighttek.com/talisman.htm
I've been watching its progress for years now and am pretty impressed, although it does take some time to get set up for your own personal tastes. Not for those who want to install and instantly use....
One of the ideas I like about lifestreams are their sense of space. I think space is really important in organization. Lifestreams, however places things in order by time, which I don't think is often important for organization. I personally can't remember when I bought a book, relative to when I paid my gas bill. I'd rather remember that I left my bills 'over there somewhere', and go look for them. Substreams just seem like searches. This doesn't seem different to me than the features MS is putting in Longhorn (or any index search results).
One interface I really thought was innovative, was 'Black and White' (the interface was the only thing I liked about the game). I liked how easy it was to get around. You could grabbing the ground and pull your self around for short distances, or zoom out real quickly and zoom in to some other point on the map.
I would love to see a gui interface based on black and white: "I left my pictures by the barn, my email from my family are near the beach, and the porn is under a rock near the house."
It probably shouldn't have everything in it. It may be pointless to have a spatial home for your shell scripts.
We're used to the word icon meaning that little bitmap on a desktop or menu. But in the larger sense, something iconic is a visual symbol, a graphic representation of a larger idea. In my field, architecture, when something is iconic we mean that it someone has used a shortcut to communicate some greater idea. A city hall may choose to represent being a seat of power by suggesting the form of a chair. Or a window may tell us it is floating within a wall by it's odd or angular placement within a building elevation.
The desktop environment icon serves as the visual handle for some object like a document, an application or an action. To say that we can find some new paradigm other than an icon doesn't solve the basic problem that humans need handles on things to understand and use them. Granted, there may be another clever re-interpretation of the desktop metaphor, but we'll still need the same handles. And because visual perception is the first means humans have to approach something, I doubt anything non-visual will serve the purpose as well. Let's just say that if we want to replace icons on the GUI, the replacement concept would need to be provable on road signs, transportation graphics, automobile controls... you get the idea.
(Let me just add at this point, that the inevitable humorous comments in the thread regarding the command line actually outline one way people do communication in the real world: voice. Typing at the command line is equivalent to verbal communication. But we can see the failing of this in a real world situation: road signs use shapes and color to communicate more than written text. Sure we need road names and specific situational info to be spelled out, but if every stop sign and light was only verbal, there would be a lot more accidents.)
Personally, I think real improvements could be made on the desktop metaphor. We walk around in 3D environments every day and get feedback by moving through spacial environments. While I'll be the first to condemn first-person game-like 3D navigation, I think there's quite a large area of exploration that is untouched.
For example, we navigate through a book by proceeding from page to page. These pages are numbered, too. And we have a table of contents. But did you know that a large percentage of people actually read magazines backwards? They defy the entire designed navigation structure for a spacial comfort. (It's arguably easier for a right-hander to flip a magazine from back to front.) You also have a sense of where you are in a book by the visual ques offered by the number of pages on either side of your present position. And you get a sense of the book's content and quality by it's heft, it's font, line spacing, margin widths and general graphic tone.
So why can't a computing environment use more and more types of visual ques?
I think the huge barrier to a new approach is the amount of coordination and effort required. Face it, most projects in my desktop environment are doing well just to have a picture, let alone one that also follows rules of purpose, frequency of use, tone, or anything else social that helps us to navigate the real world. We are appalled when menus re-organize themselves by use, but perhaps an environment that adjusts itself to my "position" more capably could rely on some of the same types of spatial input I get from the real world.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
Pros:
Menu system. Totally owns. In fact, I'd say the BlackBox/FluxBox/WMaker menu system is the best of all the desktop envs and window managers from all operating systems put together.
Minimalistic. I love minimalism and a clean interface.
Cons:
Lack of a good intuitive general configuration system. KDE's, GNOMES, and XFCE's are far more comprehensive
Iconified window system, imho, is inferior to a taskbar/systemtray.
If you're interested on where I stand now, recently I've been using XFCE and GNOME a lot. Currently I'm running GNOME, but with Nautilus cut out of the picture. I use Rox as my desktop/file manager in GNOME.
But what's the ultimate answer to alternatives to icons and menus? There is none. They're proven to work great. You just gotta find a gui setup that works for you and stick with it. That's why there's so many operating systems, desktop envs, and window managers to choose from. There is no holy grail of them all, it's all personal preference.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
My tips:
Clean up your desktop.
Several years ago, I found a tool called WinKey, allowing to create a huge ammount of keyboard shortcuts that do not interfer with application-specific hotkeys. Imagine a keyboard that has 80 or 100 extra buttons for applications. Weird? Useful! Just hold down the Windows key and type almost any other key to start one of your 50 most used applications.
My current shortcut mappings are:
Windows-A = ACDSee
Windows-C = cmd.exe (DOS-Box)
Windows-G = http://www.google.com/
Windows-I = Internet Explorer
Windows-N = better than Netscape: Mozilla (Windows-M is used to minimize all windows and can't be used)
Windows-Shift-N = the original Netscape 4.7 - less frequently used, so the shortcut is more complicated
Windows-O = Opera
Windows-P = Putty Menu (selfmade)
Windows-Q = Quirk for Ultraedit (Windows-U is used by usability tools and can't be used)
Windows-V = VNC viewer
Windows-W = WS_FTP
Windows-X = access the Exchange server: Mozilla Mail!
(You are not limited to letters: Numers, arrows and F-keys also work, and you can combine with Shift, Alt and Ctrl.)
And of course, I use some of the standard hardcoded shortcuts:
Windows-E = File Explorer ;-)
Windows-M = Minimize all Windows
Windows-Shift-M = undo Minimize
Windows-R = Run command
Windows-Break = Break Windows using the System Properties
Windows-F = Find files or folders
Less frequently used:
Windows-D = Show Desktop
Windows-Tab = Switch Tasks in the taskbar
Windows-F1 = Windows Help Windows-U = Utility Manager (Windows 2000) - starts Narrator and other usability tools (Winkey does not know this shortcut)
Executive summary: Click count reduction and mouse movement reduction by using short ways for frequently executed tasks. (This is very similar to what packers like winzip do. See also "poor Huffman coding" in Apocalypse 5.)
Tux2000
Denken hilft.
Add a new directory called %USERPROFILE%/quickstart to your PATH, then make a directory called "quickstart" underneath your profile (i.e. C:\documents and settings\administrator\quickstart). Create a shortcut to that in your QuickLanch menu as well.
You can drag whatever shortcuts you want in there... make batch scripts in there too. Then you can call them from anywhere with the Windows Key + R combo, or you can open it inside quicklaunch and run stuff that way (even use drag+drop)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Not one of those customizations of the xp desktop, but a new way to think the interactions between apps, files, devices and actions.
The gui sucks right now, but the concept is interresting and refreshing.
segusoland
A verb oriented interface. A very interesting looking app, with a radically different paradigm.
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