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The Future of the Operating System: Revisited, Part 1

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Re: The Future of the Operating System: Revisited, Part 1

#21

Post by rijoja »

simonh wrote: post #14
scandox wrote: post #12

My long term bet: computing will move towards an interface driven by "emoji as command". Custom iconography will fade out as the interoperability (and familiarity) of popular unicode symbols becomes dominant. So much of the existing textual input we use is designed to overcome the limitations of our software. In the future if you want to go home then you'll ⌂. If you want to go to the supermarket then you'll U+1F6D2.…

In the 80s a pundit predicted that in the future the interface to spreadsheets would be a games controller, because that's what the kids were growing up with and would want to use when they grew up. Then 10 years ago it was txt shrt abrvs wr t ftr. Except actually they were just the product of now ridiculously dated numeric keypad input the kids of today know nothing about. The latest kids craze is always the wave of…

It's a thought worth considering though. Basically you have your fingers at the "home row" at all times, so no delay or errors from travel. Also you have analog input instead of digital!

I'd say that the market have optimized creativly the gamepads to near 1:1 through put w/o having to think about backwards compatility.

What holds us back is the vast majority of minimum effort pencil pushers who want to spend 8 hours at work and don't care if things get done. They would never see the idea of making their job go faster say by a better keyboard and or by writing a nifty script to automate some dull toil. As long as they have a legally protected job they'll just go there 8 hours a day and don't care if they are doing something that could be automated in an hour!

Re: The Future of the Operating System: Revisited, Part 1

#23

Post by swiley »

diegoperini wrote: post #8

Unpopular idea of mine (not invented by me oc): Horizontal scrolling is a great idea. The only reason it is annoying in this site is because there is no first class support for it in many touchpads and physical mouses.

if you're talking about paragraphs: DEAR GOD NO.

Paragraphs should be 40-80 ems wide if you want them to be readable. My phone has first class support for horizontal scrolling and it still sucks.

Now if you're just talking about window management then yes I totally agree with you (See X11 "pagers" (a different approach to "workspaces") that are part of FVWM and TWM.)

Edit: I should probably include an argument instead of just an opinion: obviously scrolling is a necessity, you can’t fit all the information you want on one screen and paging is (IMO) generally worse. When you’re reading a document or paragraph you’re concerned about context. Really scrolling here in general is bad but you’re moving left and right so often enough that it makes the most sense to just wrap text and have vertical scrolling (with an image the scrolling direction really doesn’t matter it just sucks in general.) switching windows (or whatever) usually indicates some kind of mental context switch (looking at a different source file, looking at build errors, etc.) and so it doesn’t matter so much if you have to scroll (Although you’d naturally try to keep things with shared context close, preferably within one physical screen of each other, because no scrolling is still always better.)

Re: The Future of the Operating System: Revisited, Part 1

#24

Post by PeterCorless »

The UI of this article seems to break my browser. The horizontal scrolling only gets about as far as the terminal UI image and then stalls out. Can't pan further right. It made me think "The future of the OS is trying to do c. 1986-ish basic mouse controls."

Re: The Future of the Operating System: Revisited, Part 1

#26

Post by e12e »

scandox wrote: post #12

My long term bet: computing will move towards an interface driven by "emoji as command". Custom iconography will fade out as the interoperability (and familiarity) of popular unicode symbols becomes dominant. So much of the existing textual input we use is designed to overcome the limitations of our software. In the future if you want to go home then you'll ⌂. If you want to go to the supermarket then you'll U+1F6D2.…

Wasn't one of the characters in Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" struggling with reading iconographics, a disability similar to dyslexia - but for glyphs?

Re: The Future of the Operating System: Revisited, Part 1

#27

Post by bitwize »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #20
scandox wrote: post #12

My long term bet: computing will move towards an interface driven by "emoji as command". Custom iconography will fade out as the interoperability (and familiarity) of popular unicode symbols becomes dominant. So much of the existing textual input we use is designed to overcome the limitations of our software. In the future if you want to go home then you'll ⌂. If you want to go to the supermarket then you'll U+1F6D2.…

I can say "home" or "supermarket" faster than I can type Unicode. For that matter, I can type "home" or "supermarket" faster than I can type Unicode.

But Neo, what good are your typing skills... if you don't have a physical keyboard?

Re: The Future of the Operating System: Revisited, Part 1

#28

Post by Pete_D »

scandox wrote: post #12

My long term bet: computing will move towards an interface driven by "emoji as command". Custom iconography will fade out as the interoperability (and familiarity) of popular unicode symbols becomes dominant. So much of the existing textual input we use is designed to overcome the limitations of our software. In the future if you want to go home then you'll ⌂. If you want to go to the supermarket then you'll U+1F6D2.…

Eventually, people will get tired of drawing pictures of houses and shopping trolleys, the glyphs will become increasingly simplified and abstract, and we'll finally have Yingzi. https://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

Re: The Future of the Operating System: Revisited, Part 1

#30

Post by AnimalMuppet »

bitwize wrote: post #27
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can say "home" or "supermarket" faster than I can type Unicode. For that matter, I can type "home" or "supermarket" faster than I can type Unicode.

But Neo, what good are your typing skills... if you don't have a physical keyboard ?

But what good is your comment... since I do have a keyboard?

And in situations where I don't have a keyboard, these days, I do have speech recognition.

Those comments are me responding, having had to guess what your point is. If I've missed, could you perhaps clarify your point?

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