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The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)

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Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)

#51

Post by eschaton »

bfirsh wrote: post #12

This inspired some of our design principles in the CLI Guidelines: https://clig.dev/ The CLI is the opposite of the Mac in a lot of ways -- reality instead of metaphors, remember and type instead of see and point, make it a conversation, and so on.

I haven’t read your piece yet, but I searched the page and didn’t find any mention of DEC VMS’s DCL, or Symbolics Genera’s Dynamic Listener.

If you’re talking about how to design a command line for usability, you really need to become familiar with them, as usability and extensibility were explicit design points and they both work very differently than (and much better than) even modern UNIX.

They should have come up in whatever literature search you did prior to writing your piece. At least you can easily investigate both of them via preserved documentation and emulators, if you don’t have access to hardware on which to run them: There’s an x86-64 build of OpenGenera floating around you can run on Linux, and you can run VMS in SIMH. And Kalman Reti did a great demo of Genera on YouTube.

Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)

#52

Post by suyash »

burnte wrote: post #46
amyjess wrote: post #38

> At recent user interface conferences, several speakers have lamented that the human interface is stuck. We seem to have settled on the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) model, and there is very little real innovation in interface design anymore. Alternately, you can say that UX design stabilized on a known good pattern. This reminds me of how some people will refer to stable software projects that only receive…

I completely agree. The design of a hammer hasn't changed much in centuries because it's already designed well for its purpose. Same thing with sharks, I don't hear biologists say "there hasn't been much innovation in sharks for millions of years."

I consider myself one of those people who would comment about the design of hammer being stuck and more people should, that is how we innovate. The real world is always changing and evolving with time, so are technologies be it for computers - UI that allowed for the desktop GUI paradigm in the 90's to today where Alexa, Siri can help us do lot of those tasks just by commanding over voice. We need to certainly move on and innovate the user interface for desktop GUI or for other devices.

Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)

#53

Post by itisit »

joezydeco wrote: post #33

I was always intrigued by the Starfire project mentioned here. The concept video from Sun is definitely peak 90s, but some of the things inside have finally come true 20 years later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9OKcKisUrY

And Starfire was an updated take on Apple's Knowledge Navigator (1987):

https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0

All of these visions feel like they stem from TMoAD. Does anyone make inspirational concept films for industry/academia/etc like these anymore?

Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)

#54

Post by fbelzile »

reidjs wrote: post #15

On other OS designs: “ They are navigationally cumbersome, asking users to go to the "other end of town" to pick up their email from the Post Office” Made me laugh, it seems silly now, but that’s a pretty creative way of describing what’s going on.

"Might as well check my Thunderbird mail on the way to open Firefox in Mozillatown!" :)

Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)

#55

Post by shadowofneptune »

spankalee wrote: post #8

Take the team to read this one, especially the later section describing the Anti-Mac interface. It's incredibly prescient and basically describes the direction of modern desktop GUI + cloud + voice controlled assistants. The article might be a bit aggressive on suggesting that language _replace_ icons, rather than augment them - but it seems just as likely that we're still in the middle of the transition and assistan…

Yeah, I scoffed at first reading it but by the end I was impressed. Definitely agree with the point that metaphors are less relevant in a time where many people know how to use computers. A virtual assistant with the power of a command line could be very useful (though you'd probably want to double check their work before executing it.)

Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)

#56

Post by wruza »

suyash wrote: post #52
burnte wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. The design of a hammer hasn't changed much in centuries because it's already designed well for its purpose. Same thing with sharks, I don't hear biologists say "there hasn't been much innovation in sharks for millions of years."

I consider myself one of those people who would comment about the design of hammer being stuck and more people should, that is how we innovate. The real world is always changing and evolving with time, so are technologies be it for computers - UI that allowed for the desktop GUI paradigm in the 90's to today where Alexa, Siri can help us do lot of those tasks just by commanding over voice. We need to certainly move o…

What is new proposal for a hammer, may I ask?

Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)

#57

Post by euske »

A somewhat historic article, but I think the comparison is off and dated too because the "Mac-ness" depends on the people's expectation of the day, which keeps changing. I tend to think that as more people are getting tech savvy they'll gradually move away from the classic physical metaphors and accept abstract concepts (e.g. "URL", "mention", "optional arguments") as natural.

Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)

#58

Post by watersb »

dgb23 wrote: post #35
bawolff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There really is a physical object corresponding to the pipe If you open up your computer and get out your microscope, you're not going to find the pipe. Computers are metaphors on top of metaphors. There's nothing wrong with that but you have to go way way down the abstraction tree before you are dealing with anything "physical" > The CLI is not a metaphor - it's an abstraction. I'm unconvinced there is a differenc…

As I understand it, the difference is that an abstraction is a sign for a computational object. A metaphor is a sign for something else, outside of the computer, and only indirectly related to the computational object it represents.

"An abstraction is a sign for a computational object."

Writing that on my wall.

Over the past year, I have revisited the SICP [0] and the audio recording of a one-week short course that Hal Abelson and Gerry Sussman taught for HP [1]. You nailed it.

[0]: "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation...

(see also https://github.com/sarabander/sicp )

[1]: http://cabezal.com/sicp/

Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)

#59

Post by blinkeer »

wruza wrote: post #56
suyash wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider myself one of those people who would comment about the design of hammer being stuck and more people should, that is how we innovate. The real world is always changing and evolving with time, so are technologies be it for computers - UI that allowed for the desktop GUI paradigm in the 90's to today where Alexa, Siri can help us do lot of those tasks just by commanding over voice. We need to certainly move o…

What is new proposal for a hammer, may I ask?

Pneumatic press, nail gun, screwdriver, impact wrench, seems like these could work, while maybe not a direct dirivative. Some things persist, and are stable as others have noted. A cool thing about innovation is that the ideas are often things people didn't know they wanted until they see it.

Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)

#60

Post by cameron_b »

wruza wrote: post #56
suyash wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider myself one of those people who would comment about the design of hammer being stuck and more people should, that is how we innovate. The real world is always changing and evolving with time, so are technologies be it for computers - UI that allowed for the desktop GUI paradigm in the 90's to today where Alexa, Siri can help us do lot of those tasks just by commanding over voice. We need to certainly move o…

What is new proposal for a hammer, may I ask?

Instead of whamming in a pointy cylinder, that stress and vibration might work it out back against the force of our whamming, we TWIST in a similar bit of hardware, only we wrap an inclined plane around the cylinder so that it cuts as we twist, making a walled channel that resists working out backwards under vibration.
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