Ah yes, back in the good ol' days. They were indeed fun times.
I'm not sure what he thinks needs to happen. The standard interface will probably remain basically the same for years to come with only evolutionary changes.
There are several genuinely new interfaces out there but people are use to the current interface standard. There will always be a resistance to using (and learning) something new especially if it isn't sufficiently better than the status quo. Look at the Qwerty keyboard.
Still, that doesn't mean innovation can't or won't happen. I consider Google an excellent example of innovation; concepts like Wikis and blogs are also quite interesting.
Anything to help us sort, find, manage, create and share useful information will be welcome. That's what Google does. That's what wiki does.
Specific things I'd like to see:
Generalized Progress Monitor - consolidates all background tasks requiring things like progress bars into one single interface.
Link preview - hover over a link and get a preview of its contents. (Window with a shrunk image)
Open Annotation - An open and decentralized way for adding comments/critiques to web pages/sites you don't own, that is to say, your comments aren't being hosted by the site your commenting about; to cut down on clutter you should also be able to join certain communities to see only their comments, with a capable filtering/rating system. Maybe you only want to see comments made by people generally rated highly by a certain community of people. Various implementations of this sort of annotation already exist but none have yet reached critical mass it seems. I haven't checked into it in a long time so perhaps a lot of progress has happened on this front.
More meta-information for the sake of computers. XML will allow for this. We seem to be moving slowly along this front however; hopefully things will pick up. Search engines will get a lot smarter without requiring any advances in natural language processing.
I read an interesting article recently about this very topic, but it proposed a more generalized method to handle all scenarios involving things with progress indicators and the like; downloading/copying, printing and CD burning are a few obvious examples.
Instead of seperate dialog boxes with progress indicators, we'd just have a Progress Monitor that can display, sort, and manage all the background tasks running or queued to run.
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Ah yes, back in the good ol' days. They were indeed fun times.
I'm not sure what he thinks needs to happen. The standard interface will probably remain basically the same for years to come with only evolutionary changes.
There are several genuinely new interfaces out there but people are use to the current interface standard. There will always be a resistance to using (and learning) something new especially if it isn't sufficiently better than the status quo. Look at the Qwerty keyboard.
Still, that doesn't mean innovation can't or won't happen. I consider Google an excellent example of innovation; concepts like Wikis and blogs are also quite interesting.
Anything to help us sort, find, manage, create and share useful information will be welcome. That's what Google does. That's what wiki does.
Specific things I'd like to see:
Generalized Progress Monitor - consolidates all background tasks requiring things like progress bars into one single interface.
Link preview - hover over a link and get a preview of its contents. (Window with a shrunk image)
Open Annotation - An open and decentralized way for adding comments/critiques to web pages/sites you don't own, that is to say, your comments aren't being hosted by the site your commenting about; to cut down on clutter you should also be able to join certain communities to see only their comments, with a capable filtering/rating system. Maybe you only want to see comments made by people generally rated highly by a certain community of people. Various implementations of this sort of annotation already exist but none have yet reached critical mass it seems. I haven't checked into it in a long time so perhaps a lot of progress has happened on this front.
More meta-information for the sake of computers. XML will allow for this. We seem to be moving slowly along this front however; hopefully things will pick up. Search engines will get a lot smarter without requiring any advances in natural language processing.
I read an interesting article recently about this very topic, but it proposed a more generalized method to handle all scenarios involving things with progress indicators and the like; downloading/copying, printing and CD burning are a few obvious examples.
Instead of seperate dialog boxes with progress indicators, we'd just have a Progress Monitor that can display, sort, and manage all the background tasks running or queued to run.
Seems like a good idea.