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The Future & History of the User Interface
An anonymous reader writes "The Mac Observer is taking a look at UI development with lots of video links to some of the latest developments in user interfaces. It also has links to some of the most interesting historical footage of UI developments, here's one of the 1968 NLS demo. From the article: 'Sadly, a great many people in the computer field have a pathetic sense (or rather ignorance) of history. They are pompous and narcissistic enough to ignore the great contributions of past geniuses... It might be time to add a mandatory "History of Computers" class to the computer science curriculum so as to give new practitioners this much needed sense of history.'"
Crow T. Trollbot
Graphical User Interfaces are intuitive because you can remember the location of things.
That's easy. It's at c:/>Files\Home\Photos\1997\Family\Snaps\*.jpg
duh.
The multi-touch interface demo on Youtube was interesting, I saw it a while ago.
:(
The thing that makes it different is how casual the interaction is compared to file & image programs today. You see the guy just touch the screen and rotate, zoom, and move images around and organize it, instead of opening up dialog boxes, secondary windows, or menus to access the functionality. It's very basic stuff, but you see how powerful it is, kind of like how Google Maps is compared to the old static kind of online maps.
It's like today's image programs are concerned with precicely doing something like zoom to exact levels(%100/%50/%33/etc), but this programs let you do it to "whatever zoom feels right", without worrying you with the details.
Hey speaking of which, I wish cameraphones had a much more fluid interface for picture organization, so I can add keywords, associate it with people on my contacts, etc... but what do they care, as long as they make money off the ringtones
FTA: The current state-of-the-art User Interface (UI) we've been enjoying has remained largely stagnant since the 1980s. The greatest innovation that has been recently released is based on video card layering/buffering techniques like Apple's Expose. But, there is a large change coming. Rev 2 of the UI will be based on multiple gestures and more directly involve human interaction. Apple is clearly working in the area as some of the company's patent filings demonstrate. Nevertheless, these videos might make Mac (and Windows) users experience a huge case of UI envy, as a lot of UI development (in XGL in particular) makes the current Mac UI seem creaky and old fashioned.
The guy seems to think that the stagnation of the UI is an entirely bad thing. It seems to me that when something works well, people like to stick to it. I really don't think the majority of people need multiple desktops floating around let alone a brain interface. The only widely practical new UI technology I saw was multi-touch interactive displays (or touch screens in general, though they have been around for a long time and are still not very popular). As far as his comment that the new-fangled UIs make the Mac seem creaky and old, well, that's his opinion I guess. Some would just say the Mac UI is useful as it is. Even some of the new features in Leopard seem unnecessary to me. It's never bad to innovate, just don't automatically assume every new cool thing is practical or useful for most people.
... and I could stop working and go back to university to get another degree full time and end up into research, where would the state of the art of the UI/human-computer-interaction field be? which degree would one want to pursue? where?
I've always been fascinated by HCI but have yet to be able to pursue this in a work-related setting (where I tend to write backend code, basically as far away from users as you could possibly get).
-- the cake is a lie
Some obvious trivial faults:
For reference, just look at your screen now, and watch how much of it is covered by empty "gray areas". When you open a new window, does it hide gray areas, or real information?
This is even more absurd when there are just a couple of windows, hiding each other, when the entire screen is free space! The computer expects YOU to work for HIM and move these windows from hiding each other.
This phonemenon is also felt in list boxes, where you are expected to adjust the column widths manually to not be too short/too long, even when there is an optimal adjustment readily available. You again have to work for the computer, and ask for a ctrl+plus to set it up. Most people don't even know about ctrl+plus in column-listboxes.
Some programs make it even worse, and don't let you resize their windows when the entire screen is free, and you have to scroll through their data in a little window.
What's so fascinating about this example - is how common it is across platforms, programs, operating systems.
The feature is called "shortcut keys" and yet everyone is implementing it as "shortcut symbols".
This is terrible - when you switch between languages, all shortcut keys break!
The fact that fixing this would require modifications of all existing GUI programs is a certificate of poor architecture of GUI software.
There are many more trivial issues to fix. Until they fix these, I find it very funny to talk about future directions for the User Interface. We haven't even gotten the basics right yet!
In the long term, we'll be communicating with computers the same way we communicate with our pets, kids, and coworkers - with a combination of body language, voice, gestures, etc.
In the short term, we'll see Longhorn slowly and sloppily copy whatever Apple's doing; and we'll see KDE and Gnome both copying the bad parts of what the Gnome and KDE are doing respectively; and we'll see all real computer users using emacs/vi/pine/xterm/screen like they always did.
Was a memory storage system that consisted of liquid mercury. A speaker at one end would cause waves to travel the length of the vat of mercury. At the other end, it was measured by a inducer(microphone) and re applified then sent back to the speaker. If you wanted to change a bit, you had to wait for it to come around and short it to ground, or inroduce a tone. Your amount of memoery was limited by the length of your tube and the viscosity of the mercury.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
At least not to common consumer devices. I cannot even count the number of remote controls, microwaves, cellphones, dishwashers, ATMs, and other devices which are seem to be designed completely without thought for the human who will need to use them.
Remote controls - ever heard of making the buttons distinguishable by FEEL, so I don't have to look down to tell whether I'm going to change the volume or accidentally change the channel or stop recording?
Microwaves - make the buttons we use all the time bigger and obvious. I can't use my microwave oven in near dark because the stupid thing's start button is indistinguishable from the power level button. That's just dumb. I don't need two different buttons that say "Fresh vegetable" and "Frozen vegetable" which I never use; and I have to babysit the popcorn anyway, so I don't need a "popcorn" button hardcoded for some random time limit. A microwave should have a keypad for entering time and bigger buttons labeled +1minute, +10seconds, ON, and OFF. That's all 99% of people use anyway.
The people who design interfaces should be made to use them for long enough so that they work out at least the most obvious design flaws.
I keep putting off buying a new cellphone because I know I will have to learn a new interface even to set the freaking alarm clock and it will probably take six menu choices to do it.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Reminds me of Alice in UNIX land. An oldie but a goodie.
What I am still waiting for is multi-pointer capable x11 (two mouses) and pressure-sensing mouse buttons.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Amazing how naturally he uses the mouse -- back in 1968!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
I graduated in 2003 with a BS in Computer Engineering and a BS in Software Engineering.
During my studies I proposed multiple times to do an independent study of the history of the computer field to count for 3 credits of my general electives. I was denied every time, even with support from the head the Engineering department. The liberal arts department continually stated that the purpose of the electives is to gain breath in knowledge. I finally took a (very interesting) class on Greek mythology.
I agree with the premise of increasing knowledge, but not the implementation. The college should encourage independent research when a student can blend his primary interests to meet a "credit based requirement".
What are your thoughts?
Understanding history of your profession should be as important as understanding your culture and your history. Your profession will become a part of who you are as well! Without context, you're clueless.
That the biggest UI change yet-to-come has to do with moving from a single-user desktop metaphor to a collaborative virtual space that leverages a lifetime of perception of the real world. When computers evolve into a more transparent role in our life, layering this digital world on our physical world will be next. It's coming sooner than we think, will we survive that long though?
"It might be time to add a mandatory "History of Computers" class to the computer science curriculum so as to give new practitioners this much needed sense of history.'"
Oh please no.
I had a mandatory Computers class in 6th grade (and again in 7th and 8th grade, with the exact same lesson plan). Half of this class was rudimentary BASIC programming on a room full of TRS-80s, the ones with the integrated green monochrome displays--and this was circa 1990.
The other half of the class was a purported history of computing, the key facts of which I can still recite today (learning the same thing thrice causes it to stick). These facts are:
- Charles Babbage made a mechanical computer.
- Then there were the UNIVAC and the ENIAC.
- The term "bug" is due to an actual bug Ada Lovelace found inside a computer.
- There are four kinds of computer: supercomputer, mainframe, minicomputer, and microcomputer.
- RAM stands for "random access memory"; ROM stands for "read only memory".
- Cray supercomputers are cool-looking.
- 10 PRINT "FART!!! "
- 20 GOTO 10
- RUN
Several years ago I had the delightful privilege of talking about interface design with Jef Raskin (who designed many aspects of the Macintosh UI).
He pointed out that "the only intuitive user interface is a nipple."
Several days ago my wife and I had a new son, so of course I watched them learn (together) how to breastfeed. It was not obvious to either one of them how to make it work -- they had to explore and figure it out together.
It appears that Jef was wrong: even nipples are not an intuitive user interface.
the first computer bug was not found by ada lovelace.
- h/g-hoppr.htmh 96566kc.htm
uit was found by Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, USNR, (1906-1992)
http://www.maxmon.com/1945ad.htm
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/pers-us/uspers
http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h96000/
she was an excellent speaker who could make anybody understand anything, a real gift.
Even the most elementary exercise with your brain would ahve allowed you to figure why it couldn't have been Ada Lovelace.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Seriously. Most of that stuff can be done with two mice. Why hasn't anyone implemented that yet? Just grab the image from the ends and drag to resize, or drag one end to rotate, or whatever. Two mice would be much more natural. Sure, you'd probably use the one in your good hand more, but for some stuff it would be great (perhaps handling 3D models?).
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
I personally can't think of any use for it but a Multi-Pointer X Server already exists:
http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/
take these fancy UIs and use them to control a calculator and then decide if it right for the job.
"Right for the Job" is the key phrase.
There are three primary UIs:
the command line (CLI)
the Graphical User Interface (GUI)
and the side door port used to tie functionality together. known by many different names, but in essence an Inter Process Communication Port (IPC)
Together they are like the primary colors of light or paint, take away one and you greatly limit what the user can do for themselves,
But if they are standardized with the recognition of abstraction physics (in essence what a computer impliments) then the user would be able to create specifically what they need for the job they do via understanding and applying abstraction physics. The analogy would be mathmatics and the hindu-arabic decimal system in comparison to the more limited roman numeral system.
There are all sorts of user interfaces that can be created but they all are made up of some combination of the primary three, perhaps lower down on the abstraction ladder but none the less there.
The reason why this is unavoidable is simple due to the nature of programming.
Programming is the act of automating some complexity, typically made up of earlier created automations (machine language - 0's and 1's is first level abstraction - all above it is an automation). The purpose of automating some complexity is tocreate an easier to use and reuse interface for that complexity. And we all build upon what those before us have created. Its a human unique characteristic that make its our natural right and duty to apply.
What the failure of so called computer science is guilty of is distraction by the money carrot, starting with IBM and wartime code cracking paid for by government/tax payers.
This distraction has avoided genuine computer science, or abstraction physics as it would be far more accurate in description.
Abstraction physics to the creation and manipulation of abstractions as mathmatics is a creation and manipulation of numbers, as physics and chemistry is a creation and manipulation of elements existing in physical reality.
With the primary three colors of paint you can paint anything you want, but you cannot call a painting "the painting" any more than you can call a mathmatical result mathmatics. Nor can you call some interface built upon the primary UIs the silver bullet of UI's.
All this will become much more clear, common and even second nature once we all get past the foolish fraudlent idea that software is patentable.
A roman numeral accountant, in defending his vested interest in math with roman numerals, promoted that only a fool would think nothing could have value (re: the zero place holder in the hindu arabic decimal system.)
i have fvwm2 fixed up pretty nice with full paging & edge wrap. once you get the hang of it then going back to icons on a taskbar is klumsy and slow...
I'm sorry. "Klumsy" is a trademarked adjective of a different desktop environment. You have been warned.
Why, yes, I can: societal training. In Bulgaria the opposite gestures apply. In Turkey, "yes" is a back-and-forth shake and "no" is a sort of head-rearing gesture. Don't trust me -- trust Cecil Adams...
You've seen a nipple? Get off of Slashdot, you're no longer one of us.
But for a breastfed child a nipple on a bottle is an intuitive interface.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Apple, in its early days, had a good sense of what was important in a user interface, and that was expressed in the "Apple Human Interface Guidelines". Much of that knowledge has been lost.
One of the original Apple rules was "You should never have to tell the computer something it already knows". Consistently applying this rule requires a clear separation between infomration about the host environment and individual user preferences, something most programs don't do well. Apple was reasonably faithful to that rule in their early days, but over time, got sloppy. Microsoft never did as well, and it was an alien concept in the UNIX world.
It's common, but wrong, to bind environment decisions at program install time, which means that a change in the environment breaks applications in mysterious ways. The whole concept of "installers" is flawed, when you think about it. You should just put the application somewhere, and when launched, it adapts to the environment, hopefully not taking very long if nothing has changed. That was the original MacOS concept.
Much of the trouble comes from failing to distinguish between primary and derived sources for information. "This program understands .odf format" is primary information, and should be permanently associated with the program itself and readable by other programs. ".odf documents can be opened with any of the following programs" is derived information, and should be cached and invalidated based on the primary information. "I would prefer to open .odf documents with OpenOffice" is a user preference. None of the mainstream operating systems quite get this right. That kind of thing is the frontier in user interfaces, not eye candy.
I don't think it's that you "can't get people to convert," it's that the designers haven't come up with a compelling reason to get people to abandon what they know. Someone who's worked with a mouse+keyboard, desktop-style GUI for (in some cases) 20 years or more, isn't going to completely retrain themselves without a darn good reason. Right now, there aren't many compelling reasons to switch.
In essence I'm agreeing with you; there certainly haven't been very many really radical designs, and because of that, there haven't been many designs that really offer the average user that much more benefit over what they're using now.
Offer something significantly better -- enough to cover the retraining cost -- and people will flock to it. There's nothing particularly enjoyable for most people about using a QWERTY keyboard and mouse, it's just what they're used to because it's "good enough." Come up with an interface that lets people enter data as quickly and accurately as they can with a keyboard, and move objects as easily as they can with a mouse, and view and comprehend data as quickly as they can on a monitor, and -- like my grandmother used to say about building a better mousetrap -- people will beat a path to your door. It's just that to date, nobody has really built that better system; at least not that I've ever seen.
Designers seem hesitant to go 'outside the box' because they percieve users as being tame, but really it's the users who are cynical about new designs, because most of them are nothing but lame rehashes; "difference for the sake of difference," which throw away optimizations painstakingly made over years (or in some cases decades) without offering much new. It's not until designers really go outside the box that they'll stand a chance of finding a Better Way, and when they do, the users will follow.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Greets! http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html The Sloan MouseSite has better video where you can actually read what Doug has on the screen! I've been lucky enough to see this video with commentary by Doug - he's still around, still has ideas relevant and ahead of most of the rest of the computing world and is always glad to discuss his ideas with people. You can find out his current plans at the Bootstrap Institute: http://www.bootstrap.org/
The problem with the rat race is, even if you win, you're still a rat!
mine has two dials:
1. power
2. time
to start it you close the door, to stop it you open the door or ding the time dial yourself
though they are getting harder to track down. Why my toaster needs 5 buttons as well as the time dial i will never know, presumably they'll be getting clocks soon too.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
I can't think of any reason why someone would want to fake a 1968 computer GUI video but there are several things here that confuse me.
1. The mouse and GUI were not invented until the 1970's by Xerox. In 1968 the microprocessor hadn't even been born yet.
2. Look at the headset that the guy is wearing. They did not have small compact, against the ear, short tube microphoned, headsets in 1968. They used around the ear headphones hte size of your fist with a boom microphone sticking out the side. They just did not have those kinds of headsets back then. Look at any vintage NASA or military video, and they had the best that money could buy.
And last but not least, despite the fact that there were no micro processors in 1968, there were also no video displays capable of rendering a rasterized mouse cursor..... They used teletype formated rows and columns of ASCII characters. Hell in 1968 even super computers still used teletype terminals and punch cards......
It looks like a well done fake using computer effects to age the video.
For simple things, sure, a touchscreen works wonders. Kiosks and self-contained systems (such as medical equipment) would be complicated without them.
But for any other general-purpose computer, the touchscreen lost out long ago. There were a number of touchscreen monitors for sale in the 90s, all the way to today, but they never made inroads over the mouse. The problem is two-fold:
1. people don't like raising their arms to horizontal and manipulating a screen while seated. It is an unnatural position. See, normally when you're STANDING and your arms are horizontal, you are using your entire body as a pivot point. Watch a painter at-work: they move more than just their upper-body, and this makes the work feel "easier" because the loads are distributed to more muscles. When you sit at a touchscreen, you have to use just the upper-body to move and keep your hands horizontal, causing you to wear out faster.
2. touchscreens are inherently large with low-resolution, like all monitors. What this means is you end up moving your finger a lot further than you should have to, because your shoulder-arm-wrist-hand-finger is capable of much higher reolution than the screen (typical mouse resolution is 600 dpi, typical screen resolution is 100 dpi). The end result is more strain than you should have to endure.
In fact, the modern touchpad on laptops is proof that these two issues make touchscreens unusable:
* touchpads are MUCH higher resolution than their respective screens, yet they are as usable as mice or trackballs.
* touchpads are at the horizontal position, a much more natural position for your hands while seated.
Leave the touchscreens to their niches: self-contained, rugged computers, and kiosks. For seated computing, the mouse is a better extension of the human hand than a touchscreen will ever be.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Use voice recognition on a phone tree lately? It is improving. Hell the default voice-recognition that comes with XP works accurately enough with a little training. Application commands are part of the package -- why not OS commands?
I can map my own shortcut keys if I desire. Have I simply missed the possibility of how to map a selected vocabulary of voice commands to my OS? Without having to pay for Dragon Naturally Speaking, that is. (I'm cheap, and I have good projection.)
Thanks for pointing that out! I was wishing there was something like this. You, and others who have pointed the same thing out, are perfectly correct that a smooth scroll ought to be the behavior with the mouse wheel.
And the brethren went away edified.