Slashdot Mirror
A Close(r) Look At OLPC Human Interface Guidelines
feranick writes "There have been a lot of articles on Slashdot about the OLPC project, most of
them regarding the hardware, the social impact or the cost of the
operation itself. However the software development,
specifically in the GUI didn't get so far much attention. This
blog summarizes some of the OLPC
global interface guidelines. You will see that what is really
new in the laptop is not the laptop itself, but the completely new idea
behind the design, where instead of applications you have activities,
documents are now journals,
'application bundles can be signed by
whoever works on them — because
there is a view source key on the keyboard,
anybody can modify an app
and distribute it'. It really looks like if this is successfully, we
could see a new breakthrough in GUI design also in mainstream PCs: "This
UI is quite simply one of the deepest and most interesting redesigns of
the desktop user interface ever produced. It makes MacOS look like what
it is — boring and unoriginal.""
The most annoying thing i can thing of in a UI and i find it every where, is the endless menus!
there should be some way to work this out
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
When Bill gets his way?
> "This UI is quite simply one of the deepest and most interesting redesigns of the desktop
> user interface ever produced. It makes MacOS look like what it is -- boring and unoriginal."
Wrong answer.
If something is good, it *is*, of its own accord. There is no need to assert *something else is bad* - unless you're feeling insecure.
Applications are activities, documents are journals...hell, why don't we call the laptop a leg-sittin' typing machine? To call the renaming of anything a major GUI change is absurd.
We didn't really need this as part of the discussion.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
This is new? The people from Xerox Parc are going to disagree.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
The OLPC hardware is very nice actually. I've held it in my hands, and it is sturdy and looks nice. The worst part is the keyboard, which is dire - hopefully this is something they will work on in the future to improve. Sadly it had run out of battery when I got my mitts on it, so I cannot comment on the user interface, and the operation thereof.
However there are some interesting points in the blog post - it just depends on whether they are valid for the OLPC.
Fitts Law in corners for example works well when you have a mouse you can fling into the corner. But the OLPC has a trackpad, and we all know they're not so good for flinging the cursor into the corner. Something localised would be far better, for example a double-tap + pop-up directional menu for actions. Also Mac OS X lets you assign the corners to actions, contrary to his post. Many people disable these because they're annoying!
when i was read this i found this " While Bulletin-boards provide a layer of abstraction on top of any given activity, the View Source button allows one to look behind the activity, peeling away layers of abstraction in order to reveal the underlying codebase which makes it tick. " So i think what they mean is they are going to let them mess with the code, or explore the code and just make new programs?
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
I never get used to these constant resurrections
Can we produce enough OTHPC? [One Tinfoil Hat Per Child]
A View Source Key -- now there's a top level UI component that hundreds of millions of computer users have been begging for.
For "boring and unoriginal" I read "uncluttered and familiar". People who want to accomplish a task on a computer don't want an interface they have to learn to use from scratch. If the point of the OLPC is to help children to learn to program, then an interface they have to explore to use and can tweak by a little coding is a good thing. But for most people an OS like OS X is just fine, thank you. Really, what was the point of the last sentence in the summary if not Mac bashing?
Perhaps I missed it, but is there a new type of keyboard or trackpad or input device for this project? If I still point with a mouse and type with a keyboard, it's not revolutionary. They may have organized a few things better, but let's look for something more intuitive to call "revolutionary". My two cents that no one will read because of my damned karma.
it's true. And feeding children is important.
So is giving children tools to teach them, and bring them up from poverty. Both efforts are important.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
"It makes MacOS look like what it is -- boring and unoriginal."
The new GUI might be revolutionary, and useful, and create the new paradigm. Just like MacOS did.
OLPC might make the now mature MacOS look boring. But if it makes MacOS look "unoriginal", just because so many have copied it, then the audience must be a world of children with the first laptop they've ever seen. Because MacOS originated the features that MacOS still keeps the cutting edge - until something like OLPC maybe replaces it. Even if so many others have copied it, MacOS is the original.
Unless you want to dig into MacOS's roots, like the Apple Lisa, or the Xerox Star. Which were prototypes, even the failed release Lisa. All PC design has been evolutionary, however big a leap one subsystem (like a GUI, or a LAN, or a laser printer on it, or an input peripheral like a mouse) makes. But those seminal roots just show how original was the MacOS, which made it work with its original improvements and integrations.
We should replace the ancient Mac GUI paradigm. It was revolutionary in the home and office, because it finally put the home and office on the screen, replacing the algebra classroom and typesetter formes. The original. Now it's over two decades old, and we're all more familiar with PCs than with file cabinets and document scrolls. So when we improve the paradigm, it's good to target the original. Pretending that MacOS isn't original makes it harder to beat it.
--
make install -not war
Giving food will only sustain a larger famine. It actually makes the problem worse.
Just so you know as well, there is a world food shortage. Food is basically oil in terms of scarcity and world-wide production. We don't have the food to feed the world. The world needs to learn how to do it themselves. Therefore if we spent all our time and effort giving people food the world would actually be a worse place. Giving people the ability to learn how to do things for themselves, as opposed to only teaching them how to put out their hand and beg for food is surely a much better approach to the problem.
There was another obvious point: You can still give them food at the same time. The OLPC project does not prevent aid! Also, I love how everyone is so specific to "omg teh children". Because as soon as people become adults we really just couldn't care less, huh? Perhaps if they had some/any education before they became adults they'd be able to take care of the children themselves. Also, let's just skip the arms trade arguments altogether and blame the OLPC project for the proliferation of the problem.
Food is good and all, but the fact is that in most of the countries this laptop is aimed at, people eat well. They're frankly some of the oldest cultures around (Arabic, Thai, Nigerian) and have survived because they know how to make and produce and eat food. That's not the issue. I spent a month working in the villages of rural Thailand. These people eat well but they have nothing to do. They just sit around during the summer and talk, as there is no extra water for farming, no economy to support, and no need to do anything other than talk. Everyone is doing just fine.
What is needed is education, access to the world beyond their village and the "city" miles away. These laptops will possibly (though again, efficacy has yet to be proven) encourage such interaction, learning and initialization into the modern world. Furthermore, the people are not stupid. The one computer that was in the government office was used regularly by middle and high-schoolers downloading music, reading up on the latest news from Bangkok, the weather, or various other games. But creation of original content, for access within the village, is another issue altogether.
As a side - those people were some of the happiest people I have ever met. They were not hungry, were not in a hurry, never spent much time indoors, never needed anything more than what they had. By connecting them to the capitalistic global society with these laptops we take away their status quo. They will be hungry, not for food, but for education, for money, for placement within the larger world. And it will destroy the villages as they know it. For better or worse.
Something to think about.
Ahh, but to get any media credence, you need to get a handful of 3rd world countries to buy into your idea. Then you can have your recognition.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
I personally hover between your view that this whole thing is a huge waste of time and money that could be better spent elsewhere and the view that OLPC is going to help end poverty because of the educational opportunities of the platform. At this point I think that the upside is bigger than the downside. OLPC has no place in areas with famine conditions and money should be spent for found but there are many, many places in the world where people are poor but not at immediate risk of death. I think one of the best examples of where OLPC could bring about a benefit is in Nigeria when many religious leaders objected to polio vaccines. Without a basic understanding of medicine, illness and biology people saw polio vaccines being given and when some of those same people got AIDS it seemed like the nurses were giving AIDS to people. They weren't of course but how do you explain that? If people can start from an early age with even a very basic education in modern medicine, we help people learn how to protect themselves from illness and know what to do if someone is sick (when you need to go to a doctor when it will clear up on its own, etc.). That's just in the area of medicine. Will it all work out like that? I don't know but I really hope it does.
You are describing an old Yugo (real cost 10$), which left the road (hence it flies) while running on rakia-gazoline mix (rakia is local balkan brandy which is often made of garbage, shit and a few other similar ingredients). So the only missing feature is the nag-vigation system. Well, that is easy to achieve. All you need is to put the biosat nag-vigation system you picked up in one of the local mehanas in control of the vehicle. If he/she has drunk as much as local nag-vigation systems can drink, you have achieved that goal as well. The car is definitely going based on user "thinking" to the extent the user is still capable to think after 1 litre or rakia with minimal meze. Voila - not that hard after all. You see them all the time in some countries. In fact dodging them is part of being a driver in these places
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
It makes MacOS look like what it is -- boring and unoriginal.
Great, the tired old PARC attack lives on. How about the blunt fact that Mac's creator, Jef Raskin, published on ergonomic (including graphical) user interfaces years before Xerox PARC was founded? Although Engelbart deserves all the fame he has and then some, there was a good dose of pure original vision in Apple's Macintosh just as well.
(The Mac and the first Mac OS were so original that Raskin had trouble getting funds for the project until his GUI idea got approved for the Lisa as well, and so original that the jealous Steve Jobs tried to kill the project multiple times before he finally visited PARC with Raskin, hijacked the project, and smoked Raskin out of Apple to work on the intriguingly "turn-coat" Canon Cat.)
There's a VMWare image of the OLPC system (forget where...found the link on OSNews.com) and I downloaded it and played with it a bit. The "Sugar" interface is one those things that presumably works better on the intended hardware, because moving the mouse around to get to the "desktop" or whatever it was got old really fast.
The other issue, which I can appreciate is a very non-trivial task because it has to work with non-computer savvy kids (and presumably adults) in a variety of languages, is that the icons didn't make any sense to me, nor did most of the interface. I got that the globe icon was a browser, but that was pretty much it. A couple of apps I still don't understand what they do.
Being that it's Linux underneath, the standard ctrl-alt-backspace killed the interface and I was able to log in as root (no password) and poke around. The one programming language they include is Perl, and that got me thinking about why not give the kids an interface or some capability to develop their own software too? The next killer app could be written by a kid on a OLPC machine. It looked like they also included a version of Squeak (Smalltalk) as well, but I only saw the interface come up once and wasn't able to get back to it again. Would they ship the docs in all languages as well?
http://mirrordot.org/stories/0d5335e04a5fd31cdcfcc ee3d0484fd9/index.html
Posted anonymously, because that's what all the cool kids do.
Typical american view of the world: everyone is starving out there. FYI: the OLPC is not intended to starving people, it is *not* food... It is intended for people who get their *basic* needs met already with the idea of helping themselves get out of poverty and hopefully improving the general economy of the country as well. Gee, what's so difficult to grasp? Following your argument we should not give any education to the poor either since what they need is food? What huge nonsense.
But first, my good sir, you will need letterhead and business cards. Then we will write news articles.
caritj.org
The world would be a better place if allegedly educated indiciduals in the first world stopped thinking that the world outside the US and western europe consists of starving masses in shanty towns.
This is not destined for Somalia or Darfur.
This is for middle income countries where an important goal is to educate the kids properly, but can't afford to buy Dells, never mind the kind of power distribution grid we take for granted.
I am willing to bet humans spend a lot more "time, money, and effort" feeing children than they did on this project though.
If we were to spend the same amount of resources feeding people as we did on this (and similar) projects things would be far worse.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I'm not the OP but it is somewhat obvious to me. Unfortunately not to all here.
Mac OS interface here is not a reference to the Mac itself, as I see, but to the paradigm created at Xerox Palo Alto labs (the Star system, IIRC), also know as WIMP -- windows, icons, mouse & pointer.
Many know the Mac, few the Star. Now, regarding Windows and Linux, we all know both came later; Linux has a lot of different ideas, including keyboard-only interfaces and Windows is lame.
Maybe the original poster should use "wimp" instead of Mac, but still...
If humans would spend as much time, money, and effort with feeding children as they are with giving third world countries hand cranked computers with pretty picture interfaces, the world would be a better place.
A smart businessman looks for return on investment. Right now many countries spend huge amounts providing food to other countries. This investment is much larger than the OLPC project. The food donated in this way destroys the local market for food, decimating the remains of the agricultural sector (the only real industry in many places) and making them dependent upon future handouts. The way around this is to provide them with more the the results of an industry, but with all the tools and knowledge necessary to build the industry from scratch. For agriculture that can compete, this means the entire industrial base to make farm equipment, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, GM foods, etc. This investment would be huge, but some level of it is provided in some places. Alternately, for a relatively tiny investment we can provide them with all the tools and knowledge needed to compete in the computer/intellectual property market. The OLPC project gives them everything needed to gain education and learn to create applications and information on computers.
Thank you for the green foot pedal computer with the fishes on the screen! I wish I could eat them...I am so hungry...
Sorry, but your world view is out of date. For the most part, people do have food. They just don't have jobs so they can build a life... partly because we gave them food. It is humane to give starving people food, but it is much better to give starving people both food and a means of making money so they can buy their own food in future.
is the one that hasn't been usability tested yet.
from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question
"There is very little public information about requirements gathering, usability and user testing. In other words, how do you know whether the OLPC (i) will meet your users' needs and (ii) is easy enough for them to use? Have the target user groups been characterized? What ongoing plans do you have for this? I`d Like test the OLPC in Argentina, Please contct with me to know how. Thanks.
As far as I know, there are two local groups in Argentina with test boards (don't know if anybody has the 2B1/XO prototypes though). They are Ututo and Tuquito. I know Ututo had some explicit arrangements to let other people use/test the boards. If anybody knows about other groups (or about any local XOs) please let me know (or post in the OLPC Argentina pages. --Xavi 07:23, 6 December 2006 (EST)"
Before you go off spouting that you've designed a radical new UI that's better than anything else you might want to usability test it. Now I couldn't find anything on the link to Ututo and the link to Tuquito doesn't seem to have any English content but from the answer to the question it doesn't sound like there's a real plan for user testing a radical new UI that will be given to people who, according to the HIG are young and inexperienced.
To the designer's credit both of those criteria (young and inexperienced) give you the best possible scenario for introducing a new UI since children are more willing to play around and experiment and inexperienced computer users don't have the legacy of using an OS that worked any different from what you're giving them. Even with those advantages I'd hope that a project that is intended for a global audience would have more substantial usability testing plans than "lets give a couple to some people in Argentina and see what they think". I'm certainly not going to go all gaga over an untested UI that starts by throwing out decades of learning about how people interact with software.
All those good points about OSX aside, has anyone else used the OLPC GUI interface?
I can guarantee that it will drive all those who have used a computer before nuts, and I do question whether a children who have not used a computer before be able to do any better either.
The whole article can be accessed through the www.technologyreview.com website.
I saw a demo of Sugar running on an actual laptop only last Thursday. It exists, therefore, it cannot be vapourware.
For a couple of seconds there, I thought "Wow! The same amount as the original 1984 Macintosh." My, how times change...
Remember when John McCarthy said (sorry, I don't have the exact quotation... if anyone does I'd love to have it and the source) that there were no theoretical barriers to artificial intelligence any more, they knew how to do it and the only thing they needed was a "million words of memory?"
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
You could download it and run it yourself you know.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The link to the OLPC Human Interface Guidelines shows a horizontally oriented graphical table of contents - colored table cells to contain links to each section. And then whole page is rendered with with all of the editable sections rendered to show visual containment inside a bunch of DIVs, w/forward/backward nav, etc. Does anyone know if that is core, or some type of mediawiki extension? I'd like to experiment with it further. Can someone point me to the source of that extension for mediawiki? Its very interesting.
This is a refreshing new take on computing, and quite possibly a necessary and due one, too ... but I can't help wondering if this is a case of "hey mac, this new gadget of yours looks GREAT ....but you try it first and we'll see how it works out, mmkay?"
:)
I agree that it is creative and ballsy and everything, but has it even been tested? Wouldn't it be even more ballsy to test it on ourseves before peddling it as an educational tool to the poorer part of the world? I know I'm being rather critical here, and will probably be flamed for it. Flame away, let's debate it.
I should also say that I am quite FOR the OLPC project as a whole; I wish we could do this for the entire planet. I'm sure doing so would increase the incentive of making it truly good -- as well as wreak havoc on traditional networking, security, and that whole business, which indubitably would benefit the consumer in the long run.
"Good news, everyone!"
But Mac OS X's GUI IS bad -- at least compared to Mac OS 9. UI design has never been the same at Apple since jobs fired practically the entire HCI research department back in 1997 around when Mac OS X was first being designed.
Initial Alpha builds of Rhapsody kept the Mac OS 9 user experience intact. Soon after the firing came the introduction of the Dock, the changes to erase stability of spatial reference, and the dumping of many of Mac OS 9's nicer UI features. It also allowed the company to release the OS in a state where the Finder was barely unusable in icon view mode. Oh, and the HCI labs would've thrown a fit if they'd still been there and Apple was releasing apps that didn't even use the same sets of widgets as those in the rest of the operating system. (Hence the confusion of Aqua and "brushed metal" apps.)
Back when the HCI labs were going strong at Apple, a lot of innovative research into HCI was being constantly churned out there. Innovation and a consistent user experience were king. Now, though, it's all flash and no substance. It's why I no longer count myself as a Mac fan. I put up with the instability and the poor multitasking in the Classic days because the user experience was still so much better than everything else. Nowdays, I purely run my Mac from the command line because the Finder is such utter and complete crap compared even to Explorer under Windows.
Thank God somebody's still advancing UI research with a focus on consistency and ease of use beyond the first three days of owning the machine.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Because there's a difference, and it's very familiar to any old Mac hand as OpenDoc. Read up on OpenDoc and Publish and Subscribe and then go back and read the OLPC design requirements until you see what I'm thinking. Also, look up the UI concept of Lifebooks. Activities are identical to OpenDoc components, and the Journal is a Lifebook.
The OLPC isn't doing anything new, per se, but it's bringing together a lot of old UI design concepts that have been sitting on the shelf untried for years and years.
Personally, I'm psyched. These are great ideas that have been considered impractical because they're somewhat incompatible with the current desktop metaphor and would lead to confusion. Also, previous attempts at some of these concepts had design flaws that are correctable upon reflection. Starting from scratch allows the OLPC to completely revitalize the HCI field. I'm suddenly filled with a lot more hope for the future of UI design than I have been in nearly a decade.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If they are truly doing "just fine", let alone "the happiest people I have ever met", what on earth makes you think they need *anything* else ?
I'm running a pirated copy of Linux.
THIS IS MORE URGENT THAN I THOUGHT!!! WE MUST SEND THEM LAPTOPS SO THEY STOP SITTING AROUND TALKING AND BEING HAPPY!!!
For something that claims to abstract the details of processes, applications, etc from the user, I'm wondering why the designers chose to highlight activities on the home screen by memory usage. It seems like it would be more useful to map relative size to time-spent-in-activity, or some user-defined level of importance, than something as arbitrary (to the user) and irrelevant (again, to the user) as the amount of memory taken up by "an activity".
Perhaps memory usage could at a pinch be shown as a second dimension, such as colour (red background == lots of memory used), but the primary (size) should I think be something or more import to the user.
Hrm. Now that I think about it some, there are many more metrics that could be visualised on this page - number of friends in the same activity; number of times the activity was accessed, etc. Can anyone comment on why memory usage was selected?
I'm running a pirated copy of Linux.
A GUI designed by committee. This is sure to be as wildly popular as Ada, a language designed by committee.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Weren't some or many of these things in Microsoft Bob?
It's for my inner child, of course.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Sorry, those secretaries can hope all they want, but barring a major reengineering of the Word format, Reveal Codes will never happen in Word, ever. The best explanation of why is here; in summary, WordPerfect uses inline marking (think HTML), where Word uses nested containers with formatting info in binary blobs at beginning and end of the document. So Reveal Codes implemented literally in Word would just mark off the containers and parse the leading and trailing data for you; you'd still have to mentally map formatting info to the container it applied to. Word does have Reveal Formatting, but that's not nearly the same thing.
-- Old Man Kensey
The other issue... is that the icons didn't make any sense to me, nor did most of the interface. I got that the globe icon was a browser, but that was pretty much it.
I've always wondered about this. Why does a globe represent the WWW? This goes right back to the days of Mosaic, with the globe superimposed on the S (for Supercomputing?) Of course in 1992-1994 it was more commonly known as "the World Wide Web" or the "WWW" rather than just "the Web" or "the Internet", so a globe (world) was obvious. But when we're dealing with users who have no knowledge of the history of the Internet, why should a globe be the default? There have to be more intuitive icons for "information that comes from someplace else", especially when we're talking about TCP/IP to other planets now.
-- Old Man Kensey
Just so you know as well, there is a world food shortage. Food is basically oil in terms of scarcity and world-wide production. We don't have the food to feed the world.
A world food shortage? Really? To date everything I've heard suggests that the issue is unequal distribution -- that there is more than enough arable land to provide a balanced diet of some variety to everyone in the world. Some countries have an abundance of natively fertile soil, such as the US and Canada; some have used clever hacks to feed themselves, like Israel; and some have serious issues with sustaining their own population without imports, like North Korea or, I presume, Japan.
In fact, Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel Prize winner for Economics, demonstrated that the issue is not a lack of ability to grow food, but distribution and choice issues, that causes hunger in many areas of the world.
-- Old Man Kensey
What would we ever do without you?
When you get a minute, do you think you could shine some of your illuminating intellect on the question of whether OLPC's "View Source" key is a useful idea or not? I'm sure we would all be riveted by your opinions on the topic, given that you apparently read an article on Word internals once.
-Graham
There's a torrent available, on torrentspy.com (search for OLPC). Alternatively, the magnet URI is magnet:?xt=urn:btih:U5CXHOLLT5ZGRGSVSGYRBCDJJRKN6X KD
Note that slashcode puts a space in that URI. Delete it.
Right now, I'm the only one seeding, and my connection isn't all that fast, but if a few others jump on board it should speed up in a hurry. It's not all that big (135MB).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Misunderstood, out of date, misinterpreted, I don't know where the disconnect is but what was credible for a 7" screen in a Classic Mac is pretty annoying on my Macbook Pro's 17" display - let alone the 23" next to it.
The locations easiest to reach on the screen are not the edges or the corners, they're the location of the mouse itself. As screens get larger, this becomes more and more true.
The most comment operations need to be right where the mouse is in a contextual menu, selected from a specific and consistent button right on the mouse.
At least one sector of the mouse's neighborhood should be reserved for the system in something like a "pie" menu. On the Mac, up-left and up-right could bring up pie versions of the Apple menu and Spotlight, up could have the application name and menu, and the remaining would be left for the application's use. On Windows, you could have the window control menu in the upper left, Start in the lower right, and so on...
It's so much quicker to activate menus with a "twitch" than a sweep. I've managed to get my middle mouse button/mouse wheel to bring up the top level menus under the mouse, and it's a HUGE win on a 23" screen... but I'd much rather have one contextual button than two...
>Frequently, I want to use a hammer for something other than driving nails, and if some idiot developer handed me a nail gun because they presumed they knew what I was going to do with the hammer it would be annoying to say the least.
:) )
The ask for a claw hammer. Or better, ask for a 12 oz claw hammer.
Or still better, don't ask for anything because you don't know what you're doing. A nail-driving hammer has a complex face-hardening that does not lend well to "general smashing". You're on your way to a chip flying off with the velocity of shrapnel, not to mention you're ruining the face for precision nail driving.
Okay, gentle teasing aside, there's a point to this. Not that your metaphor is weak but that it's actually quite good and you're missing the lessons from it.
(I was a carpenter for a decade before becoming a geek. You really, really don't want to get me going about 'hammer and nail technology'.
I've used a VMWare image of the OLPC system. It was different. I got used to it quite easily. I had no documentation or anything, but after only a few moments, I was able to figure out how the new GUI worked.
I posted a link to the VMWare image a few weeks ago on another OLPC story. I posted it as a reply to someone who posted a link to a QEMU image of the system.
I don't see anything about the OLPC supporting more than one cursor at a time. Think the chaos with about many kids hoarding one laptop and only having one mouse available to them at a time, versus having multiple cursors on the screen. The OLPC should include multiple mouse support for this reason. See this study: Multiple Mice for Computers in Education in Developing Countries [PDF]
No, there is a surplus of food in the world, not a shortage.
Or we could, you know, help them with this. Give them food (so they don't all die), and help them set up the required infrastructure within which they can feed themselves. Sometimes famines are caused by droughts, wars, overpopulation, etc. Telling them to just "learn to do it themselves" helps no one, and makes the matter worse because a starving populace is very ill-equipped to "learn to do it themselves".
There's a glimmer of insight there. What you have to do is both. You don't seem willing to go so far as to admit to the half of the equation of actually giving them food. The ability to pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps is a very rare ability which relies far more on luck than most people realize.
Agreed.
MacOS (and OS/X) most certainly IS boring and unoriginal. Mac OS/X is based on the ancient NeXT Step window system, which was design a long long time ago. Apple has totally stagnated, and has been resting on their laurels for many years now. All their focus is on meaningless fluff and window dressing, instead of usability and empowering users.
For example, take the QuickTime player, which has only gotten worse and more obnoxious in the service of marketing iTunes and upgrades and advertisements, since it was rightfully inducted into the User Interface Hall of Shame.
Why hasn't Apple finally admitted that it's a reasonable idea to let users resize windows with the other three corners? They were wrong in 1984 to have only one resize corner, they were still wrong in 1994, still wrong in 2004, and they are still wrong in 2006. Like George W Bush, they're too vain to admit they made a mistake and correct it. Can ANYONE here give me one good argument why Mac windows can only be resized from the lower right corner?
Bill Buxton put it well: it is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state of the art.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
While the poster should not have compared it to a mac (cause its not a mac).
.just like i did. ;)
Stop trying to hold up how great the mac os is . . .
don't you think if it was so great everybody would use it??
Macs only talk nice to other macs, they don't talk nice to PC's
Some people only buy macs cause they are "pretty".
Some people still buy macs out of an absurd brand loyalty and don't want to be percieved as ever being wrong.
when macs break, and they do break (GASP!) NOBODY knows how to fix them. WHen PC's Break everybody knows someone who can fix it.
Macs are for people who didn't feel special enough as a child. So now they want to get a backwards computer
But seriously, anybody who flames this . . . you're just insecure . . lets talk about the OLPC . . . really . .
So mactards of the world unite.
I think pie menus would work well in the OLCP user interface.
Pie menus aren't radical or new, however they're a radial but non-standard menu UI that's been empirically tested and shown to be faster and less error prone than linear menus.
Since the OLPC interface runs on a small screen, and uses the screen edges to frame and control the user interface, one issue that needs to be properly addressed is the screen edge problem:
You can pop up pie menus in the screen corners or along the screen edges, by slicing them into 1/4 or 1/2 sized pies, so all of their items are in selectable directions. Starting the pie menu selection gesture near the edge or corner limits the number of directions you can move, but gives you the entire screen area to use as "leverage" to control the selection.
On the other hand, if you pop up a menu in the center of the screen, you can move in 8 (or so) different directions, but only half as far (so you can't get as much "leverage").
The way pie menus directly exploit Fitts' Law enables users and designers to make some fortunate trade-offs: Pie menu users can increase the distance of motion to gain more "leverage" (precision and accuracy of selection): trading off selection speed to reduce the error rate. Pie menu designers can trade off selection speed and error rate to increase number of items, and the additional leverage of edge and corner menus makes it possible to put more items on them (within reason).
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Almost all of this stuff has been tried on various systems through history, and hasn't exatly set the world on fire. VMS, Mozilla, and Psion/Symbian covered most of them already. Those features haven't found their way onto other systems, and for good reason.
If you want a better way to tell this guy is a know-nothing crackpot, notice that he includes the lack of a URL bar as a great interface feature, along with the rest of his overhyped claims of interface design magic...
That's not an interface improvement, that's a sense of style crippling functionality and security. You might as well call omitting access to the command-line, as a feature. After all it "simplifes the interface", and just happens to horribly and needlessly cripples the functionality of the system.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The Food "Surplus"
Also, note, the surplus is going down. Ignore the surplus number and saying "hey we're in a surplus". Look at the net production compared to the net consumption of food on the planet, then you have to factor import/export etc, also note that poor countries don't earn enough to import food (hey, perhaps we should get some education and the internet...but how?). Anyway, I can't quite find the quote source but it's here:
"For years we have consumed more food than we produce, decreasing our national grain reserves (Worldwatch)."
No. You're wrong. You have gone to an extreme which I didn't mention. You said the best way to address the famine. I didn't suggest a best way. Also "let people die?", what's the age of the oldest person on the planet? Do you think you can prevent people from dying? Also, did I suggest letting people die at all? No, I didn't. To clarify here's what I am saying:
IF you just GIVE people food, then they will become dependent on YOU for the food. THIS makes the problem worse and INCREASES the size of the famine AND number of people dependent on YOU. Do you understand now? Ultimately I am saying that in the short term, YES, obviously they need food because they cannot grow food fast enough. But in the long term that will make the problem increase in the way I just mentioned.
You're kidding though right? It relies on resourcefulness and education; once more: any ideas on how we can educate these people and give them access to a wealth of useful knowledge?
Ultimately I am glad we can agree there is a problem and that people need to be fed, and educated. There are a plethora of people claiming to be working on the feeding side of things. (We'll ignore aid money going straight into Swiss bank accounts conspiracys for the time being). At least someone is now educating the people as well. Feeding alone will not fix the problem.
exactly my point. There are perspectives, some of which require these people to need laptops over their current happiness - while others do not.
In some respects a lack of medical, sanitation, agricultural education IS needed - but with it comes the cost of brining the rest of the wide world into their homes.
*need* is a context dependent word. I cannot absolve myself of all contexts, though honestly in many more respects than I believe most entrepreneurial americans would admit, I think we should just let people be. They don't need anything else.
Bricks can be used to build housing, so the downside of bricking an OLPC is not so bad.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com