Star Trek's Design Influence On Palm, New Tech

kevcol writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has a fun article describing how many of the inventions of Star Trek have made early appearances, 2 centuries ahead of Captain Kirk's time. They talk with one of Palm's UI designers, who admits that '...my first sketches were influenced by the UI of the Enterprise bridge panels', and also notes: 'When we designed the first Treo... it had a form factor similar to the communicators in the original series. It had a speakerphone mode so you could stand there and talk into it like Capt. Kirk'."

Comments

horrible

[Quasar1999]

The UI of star trek (at least TNG and onwards) has been horrible. A bunch of numbered buttons with lines going in virtually random directions to displays of other grouped buttons that don't seem to make any sense as to why they are grouped... They look pretty, but there is no way someone would lay out an interface like that and use it daily...

Don't take my word for it, do some googling for actual set shots of the UI... it's upsettingly poorly designed.

Re:horrible

[wdavies]

Also, it doesnt make much sense anyway. Apparently Qwerty was developed to avoid the actual typing heads from jamming when typing at speed. Allegedly. I dont have proof of this. AFAIK, this means keeping the frequently hit keys away from each other. Yes you can learn to type fast on it, but I'm pretty sure its not the most efficient layout when you dont have moving type heads. Dvorak developed a very efficient layout.

Oh, ok found a reference
Winton

I've asked that question online.

[nlinecomputers]

Back during my days before the internet was in wide use I was on GEnie. A lot of the staff on trek hung out there. Mike Okuda who did the graphic art of the show and helped write the tech manuals and technical writing guides told me in an oline clat that the computer was constantly ease dropping on everyone in order to tell if you were about to request a comm link.

Thus you had Picard saying to the ceiling "Picard to Bridge" and get an instant comm link with out having to touch anything. The only issue I had was there was never a pause. He would instantly say that and Riker or Data would instantly answer. Obviously in real life the computer would have had to record that request and play that on the bridge for whoever to hear an answer. A delay of a second or two should have always happened while the computer repeated the request and got an answer back.

Picard: "Picard to Bridge"
Computer on bridge: "Picard to Bridge"
Riker: "Riker here, sir."
Computer in Picard's quarters: "Riker here, sir."
Only at that point would the two way link be established.

Obviously from a TV point of view that realistic a use of comm links would have slowed down the show.

I want my Star Trek phone, dammit

[DavidBrown]

Seriously. I think I'd buy a new wireless phone in a heartbeat, if it was modeled after the classic trek communicator. I fail to understand why Paramount hasn't licensed this to Motorola yet.

Re:Then why?

[josh_freeman]

I don't think so, but I am convinced that watching Star Trek is 90% of the reason I got my latest cell phone, which is a flip phone. If I could only find some Star Trek ring tones. . .

Seriously, Paramount is sitting on a goldmine here. Someone ought to license that. There are enough of us Geeks floating around that whoever came out with at ST:TOS style cell phone would probably make decent money on it.

We write our own future

[DrugCheese]

And how many Isaac Asimov ideas have been turned into everyday reality? Humanity writes it's own future in Science Fiction.

How many science fiction books dealt with the grim future of a corperate controlled government?

Learned Interfaces are Faster than GUI's

[bill_mcgonigle]

Don't take my word for it, do some googling for actual set shots of the UI... it's upsettingly poorly designed.

It's upsettingly poor if you want to have friendly, discoverable user interface.

I suspect rather it's a learned interface. Some 22nd century researcher computed the fastest, most error-proof interface and it has to be learned how to use.

Think about it. "Mr. Worf, target the leftmost and rightmost ships' engines. Fire."

Mr. Worf has about 2 seconds to input this into the computer. He can't grab a mouse and go:
Menubar...Weapons...Select Ship... Ship 1...
Modify target type... Engines...Modify weapon type...phasers....
OK...OK...OK...
[repeat for ship 2]
Menubar...Weapons...Fire

At best he has time to go "bleepity bleep bleep bleep". As a tradeoff he had to go to 3 semesters of targeting computer class at Starfleet Academy. But it's worth it because he nails the other ships before they can return fire.

UI books are filled with real-world analogues - in the 90's they replaced lots of VT terminals with Windows GUI apps on Citrix terminals for travel agents, telesales folk, hospital registrations, etc., and usually their productivity was cut in half on their data entry tasks. They had memorized the keypresses 5 screens in advance on the terminal apps, but now had to wait between each step and use a mouse to navigate. It's largely a latency problem.

GUI's are a great solution to many UI problems, but not all of them.