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Designing the Computer UIs In Movies
xandroid points out an NPR interview with Mark Coleran, who
"...designs the fancy-but-fake graphics that flash across computers in the movies. He has worked on a laundry list of blockbusters: The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Ultimatum, Children of Men, Mission Impossible III, and many more. He says a lot of the inspiration for computer screens comes from video games." The main point of these fake movie UIs is different than that of real UIs: to tell a story very quickly, not to reveal and enable function.
Does he also make those fancy monitors that project what is on the screen out into the room and onto any passing dinosaur?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The main point of these fake movie UIs is different than that of real UIs: to tell a story very quickly, not to reveal and enable function.
And what story is that? That computers in the future are shiny and pretty if not outright magical?
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
This wouldn't be a problem but it is part of a general tendency in Hollywood to favor looks cool and quickly understandable over accurate. This is understandable. But, it does lead to serious problems. This has lead for example to the general problem(called the CSI effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect after the television show) that juries now often have ideas about what forensic scientists can do that have little to do with reality. This also happens simply with less knowledgable people interacting with computers. And the subject of this interview is apparently to blame. I have had some experience helping older people with computers where they seem genuinely confused about what computers can do, or what you can use computers to do. And when they have major misconceptions the misconceptions inevitably are of a form that one would get from seeing a TV show or movie.
so hes the guy to blame for everyone thinking computer ui work is easy.
i would actually like to have some of the uis from movies to play around with and get a feel for.
downloading his mockups from the dvd and getting to play may even bring about an advancement of further ideas and maybe even improve computing for all of us :)
maybe i'm just the eternal optimist :)
liqbase
Movie/TV interface design peaked with LCARS.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
All these fake OS in various movies, from Wargames to Jurassic Park to Star Trek, and beyond, are all powered by Ninnle Linux. It's so flexible, it can be made to look like any other OS, not to mention something completely different. Ninnle is the way of the future!
The Viewer Friendly Interface trope was (surprisingly) largely averted in the Matrix where only a little Hollywood was wrapped around an almost unmodified nmap and sshnuke.
Putting a slideshow into a flash movie is unnecessary and irritating. To get larger images I need to use the full screen option when the images take up less than half my screen area.
Just curious...that pseudo-tech is not only amazing from an image-manipulation standpoint, but also a plot-substitution one as well!
Hacking 0%
Hacking 25%
Hacking 50%
Hacking 75%
Hack complete!
The only way to win in Nuclear War is not to play. :-)
He's not the guy to blame for people's misconceptions regarding computers. He's just doing his job and making stuff look pretty. Blaming him would be like blaming some make up guy for making Hollywood starlets set an impossibly high bar for beauty. Or script writers for giving people misconceptions about how life works. Rather, it's the failing of the educational system for not adequately educating people regarding technology, which still remains a set of magic boxes for the lay man.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
As a IT guy I hate being asked by a lay person "Do you understand what he's doing on that screen?" when we're watching some movie or TV show with a completely fake UI on some computer.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
In the 90s, with the OO( Object Oriented ) Workplace Shell on OS/2, a company called Stardock Systems came up with a great desktop enhancing package( Object Desktop ) which I'd heard was also being used to build screens for the film industry. It really made an OS/2 desktop pop and back then, only the NextStep UI can close to the default WPS. I don't think anything came close to what Stardock did with the WPS using their desktop extension Object Desktop.
The article could have went into what they use and what they've used. It was pretty shallow without that info IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I imagine how tough if would be to make a scene interesting if they showed Kevin Mitnik typing into a korn shell.
This for the ones who think Movie-OS interfaces are cool and slick looking: They're not efficient, they're not sensible, they are not intuitive and most of all, they're not useable.
I often run into people who ask me "Why isn't this or that program designed like that one in this or that movie". Because it would not be usable. A few examples how Movie-OS interfaces are very, very poorly designed, from a usability point of view.
1) They're slow. Cue CSI fingerprint patching program. The program displays every single failed compare in quick flash forward display. Pulling the whole dataset from the database and rendering it takes time. This time is wasted. You would not want your program to do that.
2) Hard to reach buttons. Unfortunately, Knight Rider is the only example that comes to my mind right now, but it's true for far too many movies. Buttons located overhead, out of reach, sometimes requiring the user/pilot to stop doing whatever he is doing right now, move his hands and punch a minuscle button somewhere awkward. Yes, it looks cool, but it's about as sensible as putting the gear stick behind the driver's seat.
3) 100" see through displays. Again CSI (but it's made its way into various other movies by now). Yes, we all want bigger displays. Bigger is better. But there's a limit to better. Especially if, as in CSI, the additional space is not used to present more information but just to display the information in larger font or to fill it with more pointless gimmicky pictures. The angle your eye can see sharp in and can easily catch is very tiny. The diameter of the screen has to be viewable by moving your eyes alone and without strain, or it can just as well be accessible by scrolling.
4) Lifted-hands interface. Lacking a better term I dubbed it that: An interface that does not allow your hand to rest but requires you to lift them and reach. First of all, it's inaccurate. You are moving your hand from your shoulder instead of your wrist, which does limit your accuracy quite a bit. It's straining and tiring. Especially when you're supposed to hit tiny icons, this is magnitudes worse than traditional input.
5) Touch input. While we're at it. Touch input becomes so popular in cellphones that EVERYTHING has to be touch input now. In case you didn't notice: It's popular because you have the input device in your palm. Now put it upright like a computer screen and tell me how convenient, comfortable or accurate it is. Not to mention that you're covering the info you try to access with your fingers, which means that you will have to lift your hand to see what you're doing. It's comfortable for quick input, but not for constant use.
Basically, Movie-OS interfaces look cool and dramatic, and that's what they're good for. They are not good for use.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I remember being slightly irked by computer scenes in 80's movies: while showing a person typing command line text, the displayed text was revealed at a constant rate, probably about that of a 150 baud modem. The appearance is vastly different than that of someone actually typing.
Same with early attempts at showing GUI use - constant, linear movements of the cursor.
I suspect that the problem came from lack of the computer / tech equivalent of a 'sound guy'. No way would a sound engineer allow an otherwise well-made movie to be released with out of sync, or unnatural spoken word.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Read the Movie OS arc at userfriendly.org, starting here: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010111
I've been wanting a Hollywood Windows Theme forever! Does this guy make one??
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Love how Sandra Bullock's Driver's License fades out of existence.
I liked the one scene in Avatar where a scientist slides a finger across a 3D display to a mobile device to transfer over the viewable data. Now that's mobile computing. I can see that technology being developed. If any company can develop that technology, it'll probably be Apple.
Usually when I see one of these computer screens the absurdity is quite distracting - often because it looks like a computer game and not software being used by highly skilled professionals at work. Actually that's a bit unfair, most games' UI is and looks much more usable. It doesn't help when the script calls for software that apparently comes with a button simply labelled "magically solve your problem".
I *WANT* a display that works like the ones in the movies. Fast updates, screen wipes, keyboard and mouse functionality fully integrated, projection capability, contextually and dramatically appropriate sound effects. And of course, spark effects as appropriate.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Half the time they need to get into someone's computer and you get a glimpse of it running, it's Linux.
"Hey, I recognize that directory structure..."
Sounds like a failure of proper parenting to me.
Guilty or not, he's on on my hit-list, right below the pope.
The movie Antitrust was pretty realistic and accurate. The computer interface that was shown was Gnome. Even the lines of code that were displayed had been borrowed from Open source projects. Maybe that is because the producers listen to professional consultant (among which there was de Icaza). I am sure there are other examples of good UI, but indeed they are a minority.
The difference between movie UIs and real UIs is actually, in many respects, pretty similar to the difference between movie plots and real life (lack of) plots.
Real UIs always have a strongly generic character, because they are usually rather multipurpose(and even the fairly strongly single-purpose ones, industrial inventory systems and such, are often just special cases of horribly general enterprise stacks, hacked together by hacks for economic reasons). They have to expose a great many of the system's features because they have no way of knowing which ones the user is going to want. Movie UIs can be highly specific, without any visible provision for doing anything other than what is happening at that very moment; because they exist only for the purposes of the story. A particularly driven production team might want to make them look more generic, just to enhance the verisimilitude of the world by making it seem less wrapped around the story; but that is very much optional.
This is analogous to how movie plots work. In a movie, everything that happens, every character who exists, all accidents of fate, and so forth, is there by design, in order to advance the plot. There might be red herrrings, specifically to throw the audience off, or generic extras, to make things look realistic; but everything that matters exists and acts because it serves the plot. In real life, things just exist, probabilities are settled by chance. Only teleologists and the mentally ill are aware of a grand design being served.
Evil Guy: You will now wire 1 gazillion dollars to my account in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.
... >
Noob: Ok, whatever you say, >
Evil Guy: I have won! I am a Gazillionaire! There is nothing you can do to stop me now
Noob: Oh, Nooooooooo! Release my daughter/wife/boyfriend!
Evil Guy: I have the money already, I'll just shoot them instead
Noob: No, I'll come crashing through the wall in a hail of bullets and stop you
*** Meanwhile, back in the real world! ***
Evil Guy: Send me the money...blah blah blah.
Actual Real Person: OK, here you go
Evil Guy: I have the money now, you get nothing
Actual Real Person (with FBI/Interpol agent): No, you have nothing but an entry on a computer screen. Gov't just froze those Assets and you don't even know it. Now, where is my daughter/wife/boyfriend whatever.
Negotiation begins...
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
It annoys me when they sit down to a PC and the close up is clearly a Mac OS. (Sometimes the opposite happens, but not as often). I recall this in "The Net" and in the American version of "La Femme Nakita" called "Point of No Return" with Bridget Fonda. I would prefer a "made up UI".
We had a thread on Ubuntuforums dedicated to this topic. I think we concluded that tdfsb is awesome.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
It's a UNIX system! I know this!
UI doesn't matter, but unlimited zoom must be there!
Please do not use "professional" and "de Icaza" in the same sentence. Thank you.
"The main point of these fake movie UIs is different than that of real UIs: to tell a story very quickly, not to reveal and enable function."
This sentence is quite telling and ultimately the main reason behind the flash of (or lack of flash) in comupter UI's in motion pictures. They are used to drive the plot. Everyone here has surely noticed the cool looking way people "hack" computers in the movies. How about the slowing ticking progress bar and flashing data presented when people are illegally downloading files to a usb drive. In some movies the UI is so 3d and gesture advance as to make the user "dance" to interact with it. This is to present the virtuosity of the user at his craft. In other movies retro monochrome looking console UI's are used to give things an analog grittiness. I find the whole thing quite fascinating. Its a dream job if there ever was one.
The coolness of fictional media UI's does make it hard to design regular UI's for real products. The user expectation is pretty high. I always chuckle a little when I start up my PS3. The main nav is just a menu tree. The eye candy floating in the back has no function use whatsoever but most of the processing during the navigation phase is consumed by presenting the cool liquid effect in the background.
I've been watching "The 1st 48" (US reality show about solving murder cases) for a while. I love how all of the UIs are basically just MS Windows and maybe a web based perp search application because is what cops actually use. I compare this show to CSI all the time and "CSI fan" friends hate me for it.
Guilty or not, he's on on my hit-list, right below the pope.
Smoke a spliff, maybe throw some Bob Marley on the stereo and chill out, man.
How are parenting and education supposed to defeat the misconceptions older people get from bad TV?
For example, I recently say "Pandorum". And they're suddenly getting data on Earth from a probe in another star system that landed 6 days ago, but that'd take at least 4+ years at lightspeed. The plot's pacing just doesn't have time for realism. You can either sit back and enjoy or irritate yourself over such things, I prefer to enjoy the movie. I'm sure doctors are shaking their heads at all the "medicine" happening in movies too. Or to go back to the classics, take Star Trek and the computer that's absurdly context- and plotsensitive, you can ask questions like "Computer, were there any anomalies detected?" and it'll point out a vital plot clue in less than 5 seconds. Same with computers now, you always and only get exactly what it is the plot needs.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The hero's position look remarkably like that of a belly gunner of a B-17. The UI should consist of two grids of 4 squares by 4 squares projected and rotated about. And the enemy imperial fighters should appear in a jerky 2D cartoons seen in space invader. The gun barrels firing laser should recoil like 15inch naval guns firing one ton projectiles. That is the coolest UI evar!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yeah, I do this $hit for Hollywood, too. Just did a couple of fake websites this past week. It really is the directors who want this stuff, and despite wanting everything else to be realistic: the acting, the sets, the costumes, somehow the computers on screen are as fake as we can make them.
Someone fire the guy. Really. Just show KDE or Gnome and be done with it.
All Korean dramas and movies pretty much use Windows XP/Vista. (Ok, some movies have used Macbooks) I get so annoyed when I see a vanilla XP install/computer in the dramas with the default rolling hill background. At least change the background to make it look like people actually use the computer. :(
I am sure you have seen it, when the characters watch a security video of something you saw earlier and apparently security camera's are on dolly's, move about and cut automatic to new shots for the most exciting action...
Although my worsed still is Jurassic Park, a time line underneath a live conversation...
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
He's not the guy to blame for people's misconceptions regarding computers. He's just doing his job and making stuff look pretty. Blaming him would be like blaming some make up guy for making Hollywood starlets set an impossibly high bar for beauty. Or script writers for giving people misconceptions about how life works.
In other words, it would be quite appropriate.
Reach to your screen to close this window: Oops, data obscured.
Solution? Put the controls BELOW the data.
Different inputs require different UI designs.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
2) Hard to reach buttons.
Yes, it looks cool, but it's about as sensible as putting the gear stick behind the driver's seat.
Not entirely true.
Sometimes you want to prevent mistakes.
You want to force the user to think about what he is about to do. Because all sales are final.
So you introduce arbitrary barriers and complications.
Star Trek:TOS Court-Martial, 1967 is a textbook example of what can go wrong.
To jettison the forward sensor pod the Captain flicks an unmarked switch that looks and feels exactly like the others built into the arm of his chair.
The odds that he'll fire the damn thing off by accident sometime in his career are probably no worse than 1 in 4.
Well I rather see some fancy things in movies. Movies generally never show exact true life anyway in any area. Why should they in computer.
Personally I liked how the character of Trinity used nmap to find a host with a vulnerable version of SSH (along with the SSHv1 CRC32 vulnerability). Nmap has actually been in a few movies:
http://nmap.org/movies.html
Not "why is everything a crutch to the story" but "why does the story NEED to rely upon fantasy crutches".
Why did the writer write the story so that it NEEDED a fantasy UI for a computer? Why not some other crutch? One that is more realistic?
The answer is, of course, simple. The writers don't know anything except how to get a job writing for Hollywood. Therefore, ANYTHING that they put in the story will be their personal interpretation of systems that they probably only know through other Hollywood movies written by writers just like them.
Which is one of the reasons why we get so much crap out of Hollywood.
It is suffice to say proper education or parenting for that matter isn't done, it's a process. Just because they are old is no excuse to be so easily mislead.
I remember using Stardock Systems Object Desktop back in the late 90's while I still had the odd windows machine. You had some amazing interfaces for win2k, one I had blew my mind, but it consumed over a 700MB of RAM with nothing else running but the OS. On a 512MB PIII machine it creaked and it was useless, but damn the way it looked and was animated was something, Closest I've seen to it on Linux is Enlightenment, but that still has a long way to go, not so much due to lack of technical features as much as getting designers to make amazing themes for it.
I heard his NPR interview and the guy is overly eager to take credit for microsoft's "surface" when in fact microsoft bought the 1996(!) patent for the technology.
Is it inconceivable that we all share responsibility of not dumbing down society?
i wonder if KDE4 could be pushed in that direction...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Rather, it's the failing of the educational system for not adequately educating people regarding technology, which still remains a set of magic boxes for the lay man.
I don't agree. I think having misconceptions is perfectly normal. You can't possible want that everyone is knowledgeble about everything. Have you ever tried to do something entirely new that you never did before? It will feel like when you started with computers, you're a complete newbie who thinks things are different than they really are. Try sailing, I bet you'll find out that it's actually harder than you thought it was and you'll see that you have a lot of misconceptions about it. Some of them will come from movies, some of them because of other experiences. But the thing is that your knowledge in the field is superficial. That's no reason for requiring students to take sailing lessons at school.
Another example (it ain't slashdot if we don't use a car analogy), my car is a magic box for me. I think that I understand some of the basics, but I probably have several misconceptions. It's even possible that I use it in some suboptimal way because of those misconceptions. I just don't feel like searching any deeper, though. If it runs and takes me places, I'm fine. If it breaks I call the guy and he will make it work again. Just because I'm the guy when it comes to computers, it doesn't mean that I feel that everyone must know as well.
I always thought that was so silly and hopelessly dated those movies. Perhaps they looked "modern" for about five years at the time of the movies.
The original Star Trek TV show was smarter: either the computer conversed in voice or displayed output on the bridge screen. This anticipated the computer of three centuries hence.
So you obviously never hacked using the ultimate hacker tool uplink. You should try! there you see how realistic most movies are, unlike most of the hacking tools YOU lamers use...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Most realistic UI I've seen in a movie is the computer navigation system from Alien. Nothing fancy. That's how it would really be and everyone knows it.
Rather, it's the failing of the educational system for not adequately educating people regarding technology
How much technology has come out since your ~80-yo family members left school? How could school have prepared them better? What would be reasonable to ask of the schooling system? What would be possible to get? Now ask yourself the same question for ages ~70, ~60, ..., ~30.
Education is a marvellous thing. A schooling can at best be a useful part of a good education. Some things you only learn "on the street".
I wonder how much of SOM technology had to be replicated on top of Windows to get there products on Windows. I also remember how Microsoft built a multi-threaded Windows Explorer version in the Chicago betas but the Windows OS did threading so poorly that they ended up ripping out most of the threading. The OS/2 kernel and the OO SOM system enabled amazing stuff on little resources. I remember seeing someone say that the kernel and PM took 8MB and the WPS took another 8MB on an OS/2 Warp system. I don't recall what Object Desktop took above that but I do remember people talking about caching issues and therefore some memory problems. But these were the days of 16MB and 32MB of memory in the early to mid 90s. I never saw what Stardocks stuff did on Windows after I tried developing some NT apps and kept having issues with memory and poor threading. I stuck with OS/2 for longer than most and Linux provided enough power and control that the immature desktops were worth dealing with. And all the reboots in Windows still drives me to laughter at the ridiculousness of that.
Enlightenment did and still does have an appealing look to it. It was the consistency and features of the WPS which made it so much of a pleasure to use and work with and Stardock added extra pizzaz which took it well above anything on the market even today.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
...as examples of what to avoid...
--
El Guerrero del Interfaz
Are you seriously suggesting we "parent" the old?
$ make available
This story would be interesting on a site not built for computer people. It might be interesting to people who don't have any understanding of computers how and why computers work the way they do in movies, and why the computers at their office or home are so different. But here? I doubt very many folks on reading this site are even remotely surprised, or find this at all interesting. Anyone with even basic knowledge of a computer would understand that the things being displayed on computers in movies and televisions shows is not actual software, but displays and animations meant to mimic it.
The content of this article is so obvious that SCO should file a patent request for it.
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
If you watch TV or movies, you see this with virtually any subject you could imagine. What it boils down to is that generally the people making the content need to dumb down everything to what Joe Average expects to see. If you've got greater-than-average knowledge of any field, chances are when you see people doing it on TV they're fucking something up.
We've already heard countless examples of computer GUIs. How about medicine? I was a paramedic, and my wife is an ER doc, and both of us cringe every time we see someone onscreen get a giant needle stabbed into their chest. Ever since Uma got the treatment in Pulp Fiction (maybe there were earlier ones, but that's the first time I remember seeing it) this is a great little dramatic moment that they love to stick into films and TV shows. In real life drugs go into a vein and even if the heart isn't going you can circulate with a little CPR. Jamming giant needles into the heart is just silly.
And while we're on the subject, all the CPR I see onscreen is shit. The last time I was certified was 2005 so I might be out of date, but last I checked we were at 30:2 compression/breath ratio at a rate of about 100 compressions per minute. Our memory aid was that we could compress to the tune of Queen's 'Another One Bites the Dust' (funny, I know) and that would get us pretty close. On TV it's way too slow, not to mention pretty rare that 30 seconds of CPR will magically revive someone without the addition of a defibrillator and lots of drugs.
I don't know dick about car repair, but I know what to do if I'm in a movie. I ask the hot chick on the side of the road to pop the hood, I stick my head in there, jiggle a few wires, then say, "Try it now." Then it'll start right up. Or possibly blow up, depending on the movie. Oh, and if you need to hotwire a car, you just yank that bundle of wires out from under the dash and tap a couple of them together until it sparks.
How about firearms? Again, I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure when you shoot someone with a 9mm it won't knock them off their feet and throw their body 10 feet backwards through a plate glass window. But it sure looks nifty.
General electronics? It doesn't really matter what you're doing here; defusing a bomb, fixing a broken radio, breaking into a vault, etc. You just open up whatever device you're dealing with, connect a few jumpers with alligator clips on the end, clip another wire with a set of cutters and poof, you're golden. Just don't cut the green wire. Or was it the blue wire?
I'm sure most people could come up with similar things they see all the time, these are just a few of the ones that I notice. I probably gloss over lots more simply because for those subjects, I am the Joe Average and whatever they're doing looks totally plausible to me even though someone somewhere is gnashing their teeth over it.
it's always looked like we're going to be stuck in the 90s based mentality of the computer interface for decades to come. NextStep and OpenDoc had chances to change things but failed market choices and anti-competitive attacks from Microsoft doomed those to history. Games changers like the Bento filesystem and component based applications are now only starting to show up in vague ways as web pages in browsers using AJAX and advanced HTML features. The URL and rich widget enabled desktops have replace Bento but for the most part, we're unable to build this ourselves or exchange this information with others except for pointing them to places where this stuff has been integrated.
But seeing how completely nonexistent computer education is, most people are taxed beyond their abilities to use an addressbook to create a new email to send to a friend. Reply-to is what they know and clicking a certain sequence is how they do things. But a dumb userbase is great for maintaining the status quo.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I still wanna sue movies for giving me unremovable fantasies about 3-breasted green babes.
Table-ized A.I.
Are you seriously suggesting we "parent" the old?
I agree with this statement.
Old means anything >age than me right?
That's the HOS ... Hollywood Operating System. I can't take credit for the term. A friend told me about it many years ago.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
I saw old Pine v4.44 on 24 a few seasons ago. I took a few HD screen captures to share in my newsgroup/usenet thread.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
it would basically be like a Wacom cintiq with multitouch support and the primary display separate from the Cintiq
Here's a dollar. Give me two of those and a small and shiny one for the kids.
Oh... Did you mean that the price would also be like a Cintiq with multitouch and an additional Cintiq on top of that Cintiq?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
YHBT, HAND. :)
Wikipedia would need to have all the text on top, and an alphabetic list of ALL of the links that are now just a part of the text - at the bottom of the page with about an inch of spacing between two links so anyone will be able to press them with their fingers?
You know... like "controls" below the "data".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Presumably you'd disagree with it as well, but people do frequently blame the movie industry as a whole for such things, if not necessarily the makeup guy in particular.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Bah, if they'd shown something REALLY oldschool like mailx or rn... :)
(allegedly, Barry Schein started reading Usenet because he made a typo when he was trying to delete a file one day...)
The 787 Dreamliner has certainly moved/removed a LOT of the dials and switches compared to the 747, but there's still an awful lot of dials and switches that require you to move your focus and reach. But again, I'm sure those are completely crappy interface examples.
I too believe that there should be mandatory years of training, testing and experience before someone is allowed to operate a computer or a car.
Just like with 747.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The sentry gun control in Aliens was pretty good: picture. It looks like you'd control it like a BIOS setup. It's possible to convey relevant information to the viewer while keeping it plausible. I'd imagine most filmmakers just aren't concerned with that level of detail (maybe they should be; it seems to be working for James Cameron.)
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
Quite a number of movies and TV shows use Apple ][ assembler dumps for various computer-related activities; I imagine the intent in those cases is to present something which looks both cryptic and meaningful.
The made it interesting showing a guy writing on a notebook.
You know what I blame this on the failure of? Society!
They use a car that is appropriate to the scene. They should do the same thing for ovens, sandwiches, furniture, and computers.
In Wall-E, the Autopilot has to work the controls manually. He can't communicate with Go-4 by a secure wireless link.
Why?
Because the audience needs to know that he is breaking the rules. They need to know that he was never wholly trusted.
But they can't read his mind.
Eve and Wall-E in turn are trusted because they can't disguise what they feel.
Exposition is dull.
If you can drive the story forward with simple visual and audio clues and do it in seconds you are ahead of the game.
no shit sherlock
The main point of these fake movie UIs is different than that of real UIs: to tell a story very quickly, not to reveal and enable function.
My favorite example of this is in Star Trek V. Kirk is dictating a captain's log into a handheld pad and the pad is malfunctioning (like everything else on the ship). The single biggest feature on the front of the pad is a great big honking "Error" light that takes up something like 25% of the front of the pad (mind you- this isn't a computer graphic, this is a plastic bezel with a light inside it and the word "Error" printed on it).
Whoever designed this pad clearly doesn't have much confidence that it will function properly.
I'll create a GUI interface in Visual Basic to track his IP address!
So this person is responsible for the Windows NT Start Menu plastered up over Marie's fancy rap sheet
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
I remember seeing Sun's 3D desktop, Project Looking Glass, back in 2003.
Compiz "was released as free software by Novell (SUSE) in January 2006"
Vista went retail in January 2007...
Compiz Fusion, is "the default window manager" in Ubuntu since 7.10 (October 18, 2007).
Hundreds of videos suggest that exponentially more people have been using compositing. Some since WAY before Vista ever released...
Band wagons don't just spontaneously appear just because Microsoft finally decides to hop on board.
Sorry, I just wanted to say that. Why can't Windows tell me that when I log on?
I've been saying that same thing about Porsches for years.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
thatmightbebutsomeoneshouldtellthemtostartusingthespacebar.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Particularly since Porsches have been around for about 80 years and computer mice are around for only ~50. Joystick on the other hand... that one has been on the planes for a century or so.
HEY! Maybe it IS all about the joystick?
Maybe... once Porsche reaches 100+ years of age - they will start producing consumer models that will set you back about 30$ for a decent Porsche.
Technology will definitely be "ripe" by then and there will be absolutely no reason to keep the prices for something so basic as a personal motorized transportation vehicle so inflated.
Cause that is the only reason today's pointing and typing devices are so cheap. The technology. It has become so common. Like pencils.
That is why there are no 200$ mice or keyboards anymore and they are all sold by a kilo.
You go in a computer shop and they put this bunch of keyboards (or mice...) on the scale and they sell it to you by a kilo (or a pound... if you want a keyboard with a US/English layout).
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Do you mean that in real life Kate Hudson will end up with the vacuous, handsome, rich guy instead of the scruffy, honest, smart, kind guy? I'm so disillusioned.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
My wife is a nurse and she sees similar things in all of the medical dramas on TV. I'm sure it's the same for any profession that they portray on television or in the movies; definately not true to life.
-Xoltri
#!/bin/bash
clear
# Show some wowee message
echo -e "\x1b[31;01mIncoming message - Priority 5 - Code list AX-332"
echo
# Create meaningless message and dump to a text file
echo "Attack at dawn! Arm phasers! Raise the shields! Set warp speed to 9!" > xxd.txt
# Now create a hexadecimal dump from the text
xxd -p xxd.txt > xxd_h.txt
# Print hex file to screen, one char at a time and use beep to make sci-fi sounds
cat xxd_h.txt | beep -c -f 400 -D 50 -l 10
# Now waste some time to look busy
echo
echo -e "\x1b[32;01mTransmission complete."
sleep 2
echo
echo -e "\x1b[33;01mDecoding....23.45% complete"
# and make cheesy sound
beep -f 1000 -r 2 -n -r 5 -l 10 --new
sleep 2
echo "Decoding....47.22% complete"
beep -f 1000 -r 2 -n -r 5 -l 10 --new
sleep 2
echo "Decoding....76.19% complete"
beep -f 1000 -r 2 -n -r 5 -l 10 --new
sleep 2
# Show important looking gibberish
echo
echo -e "\x1b[36;01mDecoding complete. Message from Star Command following:"
echo
cat xxd.txt | beep -c -f 400 -D 50 -l 10
beep -f 261.6 -n -f 293.7 -n -f 329.6 -n -f 349.2 -n -f 392.0 -n -f 440.0 -n -f 493.9 -n -f 523.2
echo
echo
rm xxd.txt
rm xxd_h.txt
And if it's Wells-Fuckme ... excuse me, Wells-Fargo ... then it's:
Innocent Guy: Could you please wire transfer $200 to my son's account?
He's up at college and needs some money.
WF*Me Teller: You'll have to talk to one of our bankers.
Innocent Guy: What banker? There's only a bunch of phones where the bankers used to sit.
WF*Me Teller: Exactly.
Innocent Guy: (picks up phone) (bad music) "Thank you for banking at Wells-F****me. (etc. etc. etc.)"
Banker: Wells-F***Me, howMayIHelpYou.
Innocent Tree: I need to transfer some money into my son's account.
Banker: We would need to see identification for you and your son to do that.
Innocent Tree: But he's up at college!
Banker: Those are our rules.
Innocent Tree: Look, what if I go to the ATM, pull $200 cash, and deposit it into my son's account?
Banker: You can't deposit cash into an account without identification.
Innocent Tree: This is beyond silly and into the black.
Banker: I'm sorry. (He is not sorry.)
On the way out, I notice the ATM machine is Out of Service anyway.
I was going to change to US Bank, but then they did things even sillier.
Yes, but not accurate.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Had != have.
See, your first example reminded me of one interesting experience.
In primary school there was one buddy of mine who tried sailing one summer. With nice results ultimately, I might add; but the first week was miserable, from what he said. Essentially he...didn't move at all, "couldn't catch the wind" (his words). Me...I jumped into a boat and managed to do it on the first try (essentially I saw the sail for what it was - a wing positioned in a "weird" way). It was clumsy, sure, but it was proper sailing. (and I was...surprised when he tried diving and haven't heard about pressure / nitrogen sickness)
Yeah, me being a bit of a geek/nerd back then, too; whatever. Not having the basic ideas about things, not being able (or not wanting) to apply them, having closed mind is not "normal". It's "old". Which doesn't have that much to do with age.
You can save quite a bit of fuel then, too (though I've heard that doesn't make much difference in standard issue US car with automatic transmission...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
NextStep lives on in the form of OS X; I would argue that the new wave of touchscreen "phones" is also something noteworthy. And useful voice operated UIs seem to be right around the corner. So it's not so bad...
One that hath name thou can not otter