The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
1–10 of 58 posts
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#2It's fascinating how the GUI's haven't changed much since. I run a UI design agency (we work mostly with startups) but would love to collaborate with someone who's working on a (niche?) OS and see if we can redesign the UI. Open Source is fine. If you're working on something, hit me up. Details in my bio :)
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#3It's fascinating how the GUI's haven't changed much since. I run a UI design agency (we work mostly with startups) but would love to collaborate with someone who's working on a (niche?) OS and see if we can redesign the UI. Open Source is fine. If you're working on something, hit me up. Details in my bio :)
You can redesign the UI using Canvas, no need to do it at the OS level. It is hard to get past the standard WIMP GUI though, naturalistic UIs (NUIs) were tried a decade ago, but they were found to not actually be more usable.
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#4You know your article was worth writing when my idol, Sir Alan Curtis Kay, Smalltalk inventor, takes the time to comment on it!
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#5Pharo (http://pharo.org) is also worth mentioning on the subject of modern Smalltalk environments.
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#6It's fascinating how the GUI's haven't changed much since. I run a UI design agency (we work mostly with startups) but would love to collaborate with someone who's working on a (niche?) OS and see if we can redesign the UI. Open Source is fine. If you're working on something, hit me up. Details in my bio :)
You can redesign the UI using Canvas, no need to do it at the OS level. It is hard to get past the standard WIMP GUI though, naturalistic UIs (NUIs) were tried a decade ago, but they were found to not actually be more usable.
I’ve been following OS UI experiments for some years and the problem with all of them was that they took an approach that sounded cool but wasn’t really practical. From 3D desktops to strange card based interfaces that wanted to replicate the messy physical desk. I think the key is to redesign the GUI by removing stuff instead of adding fancy new ways of shuffling files.
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can redesign the UI using Canvas, no need to do it at the OS level. It is hard to get past the standard WIMP GUI though, naturalistic UIs (NUIs) were tried a decade ago, but they were found to not actually be more usable.
I’ve been following OS UI experiments for some years and the problem with all of them was that they took an approach that sounded cool but wasn’t really practical. From 3D desktops to strange card based interfaces that wanted to replicate the messy physical desk. I think the key is to redesign the GUI by removing stuff instead of adding fancy new ways of shuffling files.
I imagine the big issue is that the underlying model isn't actually being changed to support the new UI (even by a wrapper-layer); so you're just doing shallow edits to the "skin" of the OS. The problem being the underlying model and the WIMP model have been co-evolving, and likely aren't very open to other fashions of interaction.
Presumably, the way to beat it out is to figure out how to change both to instantiate an entirely different interaction model, and thus naturally a new UI.
Otherwise you can really only commit to incremental improvememts, but nothing particularly interesting.
ie smalltalk's requires an entirely different underlying model to support its in-place editable UI model; it cannot naturally be built (but maybe hacked together) if you try to avoid that shift
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#8Pharo ( http://pharo.org ) is also worth mentioning on the subject of modern Smalltalk environments.
Ok, I've added Pharo to the article.
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#9It's fascinating how the GUI's haven't changed much since. I run a UI design agency (we work mostly with startups) but would love to collaborate with someone who's working on a (niche?) OS and see if we can redesign the UI. Open Source is fine. If you're working on something, hit me up. Details in my bio :)
To me the most intriguing part is that, even though I pushed for more, I realize CUA/Windows is 90% of what I need in terms of clickodrome.
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#10[deleted]