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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?"
all you have to do is type the name of the program you want to run... wait
A utility called PaneKiller serves as an add on for your Windows Task bar. You can directory surf, detach views (like KDE), plus much more. This utility helped me alot when I coded for a living.
PaneKiller
try http://www.truelaunchbar.com/
*rushes to patent office*
How can we rid our selves of the icon jungles that we call our GUI's?"
Easy - drag everything to the Recycle Bin. Right-click on it and select 'Empty Recycle Bin'
Problem solved.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
The concept of lifestreams seems interesting and is an approage really different from the "classic" desktop.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
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.
OK so I have a small cheat sheet taped to the monitors to remind me of the infrequently used combinations but I remember most of them.
I have NO icons on my windows desktop as I think it looks horrible, they're always covered by various app windows anyway - and it seems that people with dozens of icons spend ages looking for the one they want. Most of the time I'm not using the mouse so it makes me quicker getting work done.
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
and start talking to it.
(In Scottish accent) "Hello Computer"
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
I completely agree with you: start menus are a pain in the ass. Every program takes a dump in there during installation, and it's pretty hard to come up with a good organizational system.
I use a simple program called kbstart on my Win2000 box. It's awesome. Although most aspects of UNIX aren't designed for usability, tool abbreviations are. It's much easier to type ALT-ENTER to bring up my kbstart prompt and type "PS". The alternative would be to do Start: Programs: Adobe Photoshop 6.
So I guess I'm saying, as far as launching goes, the future of GUI's is... no GUI :)
--You could try using Ratpoison and screen. Of course, there are a number of projects that seek to change the way various information is handled/presented/etc. See, for example, Chandler, Haystack,Gnome Storage, and WinFS. These all seem to be addressing the fundamental problem of managing ever growing amounts of information on personal computers.
What the hell are drawers? Are you using GEM ?
"Is there some replacement for the dining room table? My dining room table is full of mail and bills and dirty dishes.
I'm wondering if there some kind of 3D replacement, perhaps a series of dining room tables stacked on top of each other. I'm thinking there must be an eaiser way to find bills and mail and dishes when I need them..."
Sheesh. Clean it up, get organized. Those icons don't put themselves on the desktop...well, ok, some of them do...but not those other ones...you put them there, just clean them up.
Or make a folder called "Rug", and sweep them all under it.
What were you expecting?
My first thought is that there's something wrong with the way you work, and that you you haven't figured out how to organize your Start menu. Assuming that's not the case though... :)
I've had some fun reconfiguring my Windows desktop using using Samurize. It won't give you a 3D interface or a voice commands or any of that, but it does allow you to provide links to your important applications in a different way. For the true geek, it also allows the embedding of various graphs and system monitors.
Numerous screenshots are available on the site, but they may not all be work-appropriate, so browse wisely (the main page is perfectly safe).
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....
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...
I currently use two monitors, both filled to the brim with icons and several drawers on each desktop.
I think you are the problem. You need to organize yourself better. If two monitors are full of icons, then I have to wonder why you consider all of them so worthwhile you can't remove some of them.
I've walked by coworkers's desks and seen Windows desktops with icons lined up all the way to the right of the screen. This isn't a rarity. I can't understand how people work this way.
Organization and priority is the key. You've got four basic spots to put stuff. Menu, panel, desktop and folders. Put your applications in the menu, with links to your five most frequently used programs on the panel. The menu should be organized by category and frequency of use. Don't accept the default locations, use the menu editor! The desktop should not contain any applications at all. It should contains icons for drives, devices and projects. The latter is the key. Organize your computing into projects, and put all your data into hierarchical folders. There's also the fifth possibility of "the command line". There's no reason for non-GUI programs to be in your menu system. For instance, I use "tidy" all the time, but have never once considered making an icon for it. If you use KDE, the Alt-F2 key is your friend.
Finally, dump anything you don't use. Do you really need icons for five different music players, six different text editors, and a handful of CD burners and rippers? Do you have a document you're finished creating? Take it off the desktop and file it away!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!