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10/GUI — an Interface For Multi-Touch Input
Naznarreb writes "R. Clayton Miller has an extremely impressive GUI concept he's calling 10/GUI (video; written description here). Essentially, it combines the high-bandwidth input possibilities of multi-touch interfaces with the ease and immediacy of a mouse. The video is quite interesting, and, for me at least, pretty jaw dropping. This is a dramatic re-imagining of the current mouse/screen schema, one that I think has significant potential."
At the very end of the video they show a keyboard positioned over the touchpad. So I don't think they're trying to eliminate the keyboard entirely.
Still you've got many valid points. The mouse is still a much needed tool for many tasks.
But I'm not sure how many people will be wanting to drag their fingers across a surface for 8 hours a day. One of the benefits of a mouse over a touch service is that there's less friction for the hands- all of the rubbing of objects is between the mouse and the surface.
Can I see this replacing the mouse? No.
Can I see this supplementing the mouse? Yes
Can I see this being placed with a mouse and keyboard? No- the combined three objects would take up too much space (who really has that much desk space?)
It doesn't really seem like an improvement in window-management for me either. Sure, window overlays are a bit cluttered, but then again there's only so much information one can process at a given instant.
I tend to have a *lot* of items running as I multitask. A web-browser, document, several terminals, perhaps a coding window, and others. Having windows aligned horizontally it going to be a PITA if I have to zoom out every time I need to jump from #1 to #15. In that event, a taskbar really is quite a nice thing and "just works". Perhaps rather than having a left (contextual) and right (global) menu, they could also have a bottom/top (taskbar) menu.
I disagree with an earlier poster who says this can't replace the desktop interface we know.
He points out that it is inefficient because one has to move hands between keyboard and pad.
It seems to me that this interface can be manipulated with just one hand. that's how the mouse works now. you take your hand off the mouse to work with the full functionality of the keyboard, why couldn't 10/GUI replace that?
Better still, why not have both! The pad can sense a mouse and act as a mouse pad. If you need to use it as a pad move the mouse off, or perhaps use both the mouse AND the pad at the same time (one hand each). I can see a lot of possibilities there. It could clutter a desk, sure, but I'm sure we can solve that problem.
Second, but probably more importantly, I can easily see this for the work I do, which I imagine is similar to many other people.
I use my system (two monitors) for business. I have data on one side of the screen and sometimes excel or word on the other screen. In addition (here's where 10/GUI could be useful) I'll have a pdf open in the background which i need to quickly scroll through ("in adobe, quickly!?" you ask?). With one hand on the mouse I can quickly zip through Morningstar data, and use my free hand (on the pad) to scroll through a document, then quickly zip back and forth, scrolling and zooming as necessary. Right now that's just using a mouse and it can be tiresome to move around with just that little pointer (especially morningstar! oh it would be nice to have a touch interface for that...)
Finally, I need to have a "document scroller" or whatever it is that I can resize and move around, as I find myself with documents that sometimes need to show different parts of their data on screen. Basically I need to be able to "undock" documents so i can use them effectively (like papers on an actual desktop) and then redock them when I'm done.
That would be a beautiful interface that I do feel would save me some time and frustration. I would buy that for my business.
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It would also be quite impossible to play FPS or other kinds of games with this type of setup.
Are we all really that stuck in our ways that this is how we judge possibly revolutionary ways to interface with our computers? By how well it stacks up to an already poor approximation of shooting guns in a computer game?
Yes, this is slick. Yes, it's an improvement. Yes, this will happen. But...
Having seen people have trouble with pressing control and clicking at the same time (to deselect a single item), I foresee a chilly reception, user frustration and a training issue. 10GUI is like playing Mozart among people only able to manage Chop Sticks.
I see this as stratifying feature... the have's and have not, the able and the un-able. I would request this for my workflow, but the run of the mill admins would be stuck with the keyboard. Aside from the social aspect, there is the difficult task of convincing the boss that "you need this, even if the others don't". Good luck with that.
I have grown to hate the windowing paradigm for all the reasons cited. I'm not convinced that the linear arrangement is an improvement. I'm more in favor of multiple monitors, the main screen for the primary task and satellites with multiple windows for ancillary tasks. 10GUI doesn't address this.
Actually, he's described enough of the framework in the video to do it fairly easily with the stuff that's currently available.
Seriously. You'd use a capacitive or similar touch-pad and do multi-touch against that backdrop as an input source. All one has to do is apply something along the lines of this and modify it to understand his local/global edges of the touchpad and then implement his window management system on top of one of the lightweight WMs out there as a fork.
However, while that would require a smallish amount of work, one has to wonder if he's got patents applied for or a copyright on the "look and feel" that he'll let it all happen and then submarine the whole thing when it becomes "the big thing". If he's letting anyone have access to it, or letting FOSS projects have it under FOSS terms and proprietary under similar RAND terms, then I'd say let's see how the idea actually works. If not, I'd say give it a pass. It's interesting enough to evaluate if he's barking up the right tree or not- but only if he's not merely setting himself up as gatekeeper so he can extract rents on a potentially useful interface paradigm.
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Application centric user interfaces are already a problem. On both Windows and Mac these days there's an increasing level of application-centric organization, and that breaks the task-centric workflow badly. I normally have a separate workspace for each task, with windows from each application all visible simultaneously. I can surround each primary document with windows of all sizes, to the sides, above, and below. The 10/GUI control model looks very very good, and would work well for a multi-desktop window-oriented workflow, but the Con10uum user interface would be a huge obstacle multi-document workflow.
I switched from VI to emacs about 10 years ago primarily because of emacs' ability to manage multiple windows (by which I mean buffers in this post, not separate X windows), and I still think it offers most all the benefits of 10/GUI! You can have columns of buffers (windows), but also rows (addressing your concern), but they're not just arbitrarily strewn around. You have a high-bandwidth, but precise input channel that doesn't block the screen, called a keyboard. You can easily access a labeled list of open windows. No, I don't expect a resurgence of emacs to wipe out the gui, but people who are designing windowing systems should at least be familiar with how emacs worked. (Maybe emacs borrowed it from lisp machines? I don't know). Granted, keyboards aren't exactly multi-touch (except for modifier keys like SHIFT), but keyboards do utilize the ability to move several fingers at once to achieve high-bandwidth input.
If your keyboard is "on your desk" then it is probably not the best ergonomic setup. I do this, but that is because I am tall and my knees hit any keyboard trays. I would *hate* having anything below the desk. So for me, it might be the best arrangement to have a split touchpanel or keyboard.
For example, I might like to have the touchpanels on either side of my keyboard. I can put my hands over there. Either that, or split the keyboard (ala Microsoft Natural) on either side of the touch panel.
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