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Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

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Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#101

Post by ethbro »

KirinDave wrote: post #69
gav wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But somehow there's all these people that want to use Slack over Irssi.

Probably because IRC is an outdated protocol with inferior features to Slack and very few good open source options for connecting. For example: * DCC is still unreliable. * There is no audio connection option, which is quite popular in 2018. * Channel history management is ad hoc * Authentication is done in band, in plain text. * "secured" channels rely on this bad authentication, and if they don't (perhaps electing…

> ... I cannot actually find good details on who runs any given IRC network. I have no idea what I'm dealing with or how they're using my data. I have no legal recourse if I do discover bad behavior...

Ah, the good old days of the Internet. You make me so nostalgic.

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#102

Post by masswerk »

masswerk wrote: post #94

The single point that I disagree on: > "Let’s dig into it by looking at the aspirational interface concept from a great movie: Minority Report. (…) I think we can all agree that the interface of this prospective future is incredible and desirable" I guess, this single scene of a movie has distracted interface development like no other vision. However, it's just a terrible interface: Working over prolonged stretches o…

P.S.: If you're looking for inspiration by a movie, have a look at the status screens and their update process in 2001 – A Space Odyssey, which were grossly overlooked for other effects in this movie and didn't have much of a real life impact. (I guess, for the era they came from, the clarity and economy, these are just in line with the article.)

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#103

Post by juancampa »

arg84 wrote: post #74
juancampa wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An article, something you use once, is different from an application, which you use continuously for long periods of time

Following that logic would mean that the more time we spend interacting with the medium the less important aesthetics/gestalt is, and that the medium should instead be focused solely on function. I think one thing the low level tech focused individual can sometimes overlook is that it is humans interacting with these interfaces, and humans are varied, and as such interfaces need to incorporate many different methods…

Aesthetics are always welcome as long as they don't compromise usability. What I've noticed is that the more you look at something, the more normal it tends to look, regardless of whether initially you thought it was beautiful or ugly. Not sure why it happens but aesthetics stop being as important as time passes.

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#104

Post by astrobe_ »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #10

I'm switching away from macOS to Linux with the i3 window manager for precisely this reason. But all of his criticisms of terminals are spot on: no multimedia, no support for anything other than monospaced fonts, etc. Lord, somebody give me a terminal program that produces laid-out text and can show inline video.

I suggest Chrome or Firefox.

I find the conclusion of the article totally off the mark. The author seems to not understand that problems begins with multimedia support and other "gimmicky" stuff (as he puts it). You want video? Then use your terminal to launch a video player. A tiling manager is precisely perfect for this (I wonder why you switched to i3 if you don't know that, btw).

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#105

Post by kovek »

aphextron wrote: post #68

I had sort of an "aha" moment reading a non-technical co-workers conversation on Slack the other day. Someone built a Slackbot to show the menu for whatever food truck is outside our building that day, and people could use it just by typing "/foodtruck". They were blown away and loved it. Rather than opening a browser and navigating some disparate menu pages, they could simply fire off a command in their "console". I…

I remember on Hipchat you could edit your last message by sending a message using this (sed?) syntax:

s/flock/duck/

. I remember hearing someone saying that was the worst design they've seen in their life. I almost agree.

I do agree that text interfaces are better. I really wish that more products were exposed through a purely textual interface.

I think hipchat could have solved the issue with a text interfaces better.

Also, this is why I really like Emacs. It has a great library for creating text interfaces. I had trouble with it because it is written in elisp/lisp.

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#106

Post by goldenchrome »

You can only have success in building interfaces if you first understand who your users are, and what problem you're solving for them.

The author compares the benefits of flashy, spread-out interfaces and CLI. The truth is that both have incredible value in the right contexts. The tricky part is making an interface that is easy to pick up, but powerful enough for power users.

If you deeply understand your users you can build adaptive user interfaces[0]. LayerVault experimented[1] with the idea of progressive reduction—stripping down UI elements as the user becomes more familiar so they can work more efficiently.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_user_interface

[1]http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/42361566927/progressive-re...

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#107

Post by buchanae »

aphextron wrote: post #68

I had sort of an "aha" moment reading a non-technical co-workers conversation on Slack the other day. Someone built a Slackbot to show the menu for whatever food truck is outside our building that day, and people could use it just by typing "/foodtruck". They were blown away and loved it. Rather than opening a browser and navigating some disparate menu pages, they could simply fire off a command in their "console". I…

I remember being giddy about the potential of Ubiquity to bring the CLI to a wider audience, and bring more power to existing CLI users. Too bad it never played out.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#108

Post by emptysea »

slrz wrote: post #50
sandinmyjoints wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emacs’ Dired mode lets you interact with the file system this way. Imagine the output of ‘ls -l’ as an editable document — seeing this in action was one of the killer features that made me an Emacs user.

What's an Emacs? Running that command just seems to reduce my disk quota. The functionality you're describing sounds pretty much like vidir (from moreutils[1]), though. [1] https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

Ranger is a similar application that I don’t use enough.

http://ranger.github.io

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#109

Post by juancampa »

masswerk wrote: post #102
masswerk wrote: post #94

The single point that I disagree on: > "Let’s dig into it by looking at the aspirational interface concept from a great movie: Minority Report. (…) I think we can all agree that the interface of this prospective future is incredible and desirable" I guess, this single scene of a movie has distracted interface development like no other vision. However, it's just a terrible interface: Working over prolonged stretches o…

P.S.: If you're looking for inspiration by a movie, have a look at the status screens and their update process in 2001 – A Space Odyssey, which were grossly overlooked for other effects in this movie and didn't have much of a real life impact. (I guess, for the era they came from, the clarity and economy, these are just in line with the article.)

Relevant: https://ilikeinterfaces.com/

Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

#110

Post by mbrock »

I was once annoyed with the slowness of Lynx, the terminal web browser. Poking around in the source code, I noticed that it literally called sleep() several times while loading a page. I removed every sleep call in the code and suddenly Lynx was a lot faster. Try it!
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