A very interesting thought, which makes Apple's new Aqua interface troubling. The jelly bean scroll indicators and buttons, and the drop-shadowed floating windows all strive to give depth to the desktop.
The desktop has served an important purpose in the growth of personal computing, and has made computers accessible to millions who would not otherwise have the patience to learn their ways. But it raises an interesting question regarding a point-and-click, iconic interface, that we could be regressing back towards a pictographic society.
The Egyptians moved away from hierotic pictographs to the demotic script in part because alphabetization is a more efficient method of communicating complex ideas.
There is a place for pictures -- road signs, restrooms, airports -- any place where simple concepts (like, "go here to pee" or "don't turn here") need to be communicated. Communication by pictures, ergo 3D, fills this need.
The more complex alphabetic communication is faster, more complex and robust, and difficult, and subtle. We all know this.
In terms of a UI, big questions are raised. The more we try to accomplish within the interface, the more complex it becomes, and how quickly it loses any value. How many times have you had to hunt around to find a command because some idiot application developer put it in a non-intuitive place. It's maddening. As I switch between Linux, Macintosh, and Windows95 I get really pissed trying to change preferences in each application. What a nightmare: it's always in a different place, and often called by a different name.
A standardized UI could solve this (man, I'm really off the topic of the reply now, sorry) -- at least across Linux (as it is mostly with Mac). But since Linux is open source, we're protected from the tyrrany of Aqua. If you don't like it, change it! But let me at least have the benefit of an intelligently designed, predictable, intuitive, standards-based interface to get something done.
There's probably 150 pages of good stuff in there, the rest is hardly worth the dead tree pulp and the wasted ink.
For those who "laughed out loud" really need to get out more. Try turning on fortune when you login (not quite the same as human interaction, but a lot funnier than this book).
The crypto stuff is interesting, but so is man pgp. And I can get pgp (er, "ordo") for free, unlike this beastly doorstop Cryptonomicon.
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A very interesting thought, which makes Apple's new Aqua interface troubling. The jelly bean scroll indicators and buttons, and the drop-shadowed floating windows all strive to give depth to the desktop.
The desktop has served an important purpose in the growth of personal computing, and has made computers accessible to millions who would not otherwise have the patience to learn their ways. But it raises an interesting question regarding a point-and-click, iconic interface, that we could be regressing back towards a pictographic society.
The Egyptians moved away from hierotic pictographs to the demotic script in part because alphabetization is a more efficient method of communicating complex ideas.
There is a place for pictures -- road signs, restrooms, airports -- any place where simple concepts (like, "go here to pee" or "don't turn here") need to be communicated. Communication by pictures, ergo 3D, fills this need.
The more complex alphabetic communication is faster, more complex and robust, and difficult, and subtle. We all know this.
In terms of a UI, big questions are raised. The more we try to accomplish within the interface, the more complex it becomes, and how quickly it loses any value. How many times have you had to hunt around to find a command because some idiot application developer put it in a non-intuitive place. It's maddening. As I switch between Linux, Macintosh, and Windows95 I get really pissed trying to change preferences in each application. What a nightmare: it's always in a different place, and often called by a different name.
A standardized UI could solve this (man, I'm really off the topic of the reply now, sorry) -- at least across Linux (as it is mostly with Mac). But since Linux is open source, we're protected from the tyrrany of Aqua. If you don't like it, change it! But let me at least have the benefit of an intelligently designed, predictable, intuitive, standards-based interface to get something done.
For those who "laughed out loud" really need to get out more. Try turning on fortune when you login (not quite the same as human interaction, but a lot funnier than this book).
The crypto stuff is interesting, but so is man pgp. And I can get pgp (er, "ordo") for free, unlike this beastly doorstop Cryptonomicon.
In a nutshell: yawn.