::scr Drooling GUI

[David Cantrell]

On Fri, Mar 08, 2002 at 03:56:27PM +0100, alorenz wrote:
> I've been on a mac for almost ten years now, and - perhaps unsurprisingly -
> I'm finding it quite hard to imagine any fundamentally different way how
> "the computer" could look (apart from command-line interfaces) - so, when
> you said

Speech, vision and gesture-driven interfaces really rock my world.  My
ideal computer would have no GUI and no CLI.  My ideal computer does not
exist yet.

> > Again, why try to dress the computer up as something it isn't?
> 
> what did you have in mind? command lines or still something else?

None of the above, including "something else" :-)

I was referring to the - IMO misguided - attempts to overuse metaphors like
the desktop or the studio or the kitchen, and also to attempts to dumb them
down in an attempt to make them usable immediately by everyone.  It is an
inescapable fact that they are damnably complicated tools which we use for
performing damnably complicated tasks.  Any attempt to do away with that
will only make them *harder* to use - and the benefit of making the first
few days of use that much easier is not a price I am willing to pay.

>                                                                   if you
> could wipe out history and re-design an interface from scratch (resp.
> "dress up the computer as something it *is*"), what would you do?

Dunno, but then I've never claimed to have all the answers.  Because I am
already comfortable with both the command line and the GUI, no doubt I
would mix n' match the best from both worlds.  The end result would likely
have an architecture somewhat similar to Unix and provide GUI features
somewhat similar to BeOS.  Use of the character string 'desktop' would
trigger an NMI causing the machine to catch fire.

It's not possible to dress a tool up as something it is - it just IS what
it is and doesn't need dressing up.

-- 
David Cantrell | david@cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

  Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla.
      -- Seneca Philosophus, Epistulae