A Close(r) Look At OLPC Human Interface Guidelines

Posted by Hemos on Monday December 11, 2006 @02:48AM from the making-the-audience-understand dept.

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.""

1 of 152 comments (clear)

Thanks, Captain Obvious! by ghjm · 2006-12-11 10:02 · Score: 0, Troll

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