> Cray-on-a-chip RISC processors
The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
141–150 of 156 posts
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#142Earlier 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."
The design of a hammer has actually changed substantially over time. More recently, there's been a trend towards specialization in the framing hammer alone. 100 years ago most hammers looked like the classic hammers I remember from childhood: relatively small, sharply curved claws, a smooth face. As production framing exploded in the US after WWII, framers were pushing for more efficiency. The framing hammer got heav…
Thanks. I feel I know everything about hammers now.
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#143Jef Raskin—who led the Macintosh project for the first year (though apparently the design was changed further later on)—worked afterwards on a concept that incorporated typed-in natural-language commands. In his Archy, commands were part of an unorthodox GUI system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy Archy clearly hails from the eighties when it was still imaginable to change users' workflow with desktop computers—t…
This post introduced me to Archy which is exciting to discover. The zoomable interface of Archy addresses something fundamental that always felt off about current desktop GUIs - the inability to get a meaningful overview, that include both folder structure and file contents , and to be the inability to switch from higher to lower levels of perspective in a continuous way. It seems like Archy made the directory struct…
In case you aren't aware Eagle Mode [0] (a self-described advanced zoomable interface) exists.
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#144This 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.
>Because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that ‘Guitar Hero’ is the same as a real guitar.” For me, this was the signal that this as a "if only people used computers like I personally think they should" pieces. I know lots of people who play guitar hero, lots of people who play real guitars, and some who play both (me f…
> "if only people used computers like I personally think they should"
I think that if one could take a sufficiently aggregated superset of that from everyone on HN, one might very well come up with a philosophy of computing that actually is quite powerful.
In general I think the idea is that the computer is supposed to be a tool, in addition to a toy; with the awareness that playing with tools is often just as much fun as any toy could be, and conversely that a toy is a powerful way to learn.
> "Because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone"
I agree this is myopic. I can use my iPhone to do a great many computing-related tasks; and when it is insufficient, it is certainly sufficient to reach out to a bigger, more powerful machine where I can do such things. As long as we retain the powerful (and not yet enshrined) freedom to connect things together over the Internet, your "computer" is not just whatever device you hold in your hands.
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
The design of a hammer has actually changed substantially over time. More recently, there's been a trend towards specialization in the framing hammer alone. 100 years ago most hammers looked like the classic hammers I remember from childhood: relatively small, sharply curved claws, a smooth face. As production framing exploded in the US after WWII, framers were pushing for more efficiency. The framing hammer got heav…
Noted. What has been stable for a long time and remains frustratingly static and unrefined is the field of surgcial instruments. There are a few exceptions but most haven't changed in the 20years I have been a surgeon. The regulatory costs of developing new instruments and intertia of manufacturers doesnt help. Once a manufacturer gains a market share they try and keep by not innovating which keeps their deveopment c…
> The regulatory costs of developing new instruments and intertia of manufacturers doesnt help.
I work on (mostly non-critical) medical devices and I would like to remind that regulatory is there for a purpose.
If anything the 737 Max fiasco should remind people what can happen when regulatory is considered a cost that need to be cut in a field where there can be some hazards, and where some people in the chain do not have the best interest of the public in mind.
And yes, in the medical industry too, there can be some people who care more about optimizing profits than about patients.
Maybe there are some undue regulatory rules, but hopefully there are not the majority.
In the case of what I work on, regulatory does not prevent us from using state of the art CPUs and GPUs, so yes R&D may need somehow longer cycles from consumer electronics to get a return of investment, but let's be honest it is not too much scandalous to get some features a few years after you get similar things in consumer electronics, especially in cases where there are diminishing returns of improving X or Y.
And yes it is easier to build things when you don't have to care about e.g. ability to disinfect materials, you can cope with more bugs, etc.
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#146> 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…
Not good, just “good enough”. UX, like evolution, once it goes down one particular path, tends to get stuck there, fiddling with the details at best. Radical innovation becomes really hard to effect: in evolution’s case because any new feature can only extend/adapt what is already there; in UI’s case because users tend to reject anything that doesn’t fit into what they already know. It’s the distinction between stabi…
Apple's other attempt right now (on iOS) is Shortcuts, which is graphical-programming-y. But it's disadvantaged a bit because it started life (as a third-party app Workflow) outside the system, unlike Applescript.
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#147My favourite part of this article (disclosure: I've made almost this exact comment before elsewhere): > The see-and-point principle states that users interact with the computer by pointing at the objects they can see on the screen. It's as if we have thrown away a million years of evolution, lost our facility with expressive language, and been reduced to pointing at objects in the immediate environment. Mouse buttons…
> > Using a command-line interface is like having to learn the complete Korean language just to order food in the Seoul branch of McDonalds. Using a menu-based interface is like being able to point to the food you want and grunt and nod your head: it conveys the same information with no learning curve. That analogy makes one significant assumption: that you are trying to order food from McDonalds, which is a thing yo…
Absolutely; to tweak the analogy a bit, you wouldn't have much luck with the point-and-nod "interface" if you were trying to do something more abstract or complicated, like getting a loan or hiring a gardener.
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#148Jef Raskin—who led the Macintosh project for the first year (though apparently the design was changed further later on)—worked afterwards on a concept that incorporated typed-in natural-language commands. In his Archy, commands were part of an unorthodox GUI system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy Archy clearly hails from the eighties when it was still imaginable to change users' workflow with desktop computers—t…
This post introduced me to Archy which is exciting to discover. The zoomable interface of Archy addresses something fundamental that always felt off about current desktop GUIs - the inability to get a meaningful overview, that include both folder structure and file contents , and to be the inability to switch from higher to lower levels of perspective in a continuous way. It seems like Archy made the directory struct…
‘ZUI’ is a general approach, and there were a number of attempts at it. I've seen a bunch of ‘zoomable’ file managers here and there—however, since that's not my cup of tea, I don't actually remember any of them. But they exist, so I guess some googling might point you to them.
Also I've heard about some ‘pasteboard’ service as an alternative to a internal corporate wiki: you likewise zoom around and slap content anywhere on the infinite canvas. The trick, of course, is to keep the content organized thematically and tidy it up so it can be found later. Again, chances are slim that I will remember the name of the service now.
‘Rizzoma’, which is a clone of the late Google Wave, may also be seen as ‘zoomable’
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you read the article, much of criticisms about the state of the art at the time (mid-90s) has been addressed, and to great benefit. To take just one example, the use of natural language via voice commands to allow the user to discover new commands beyond what can be expressed with a visual UI - but there are many more examples.
The discoverability of voice commands is terrible . I have no idea how to find out what I can do with Alexa, or which particular magic phrasing Alexa will understand. My personal biggest issue, as means of illustration, is that I have no idea how to play the latest episode of something on the BBC app, rather than continuing from where I left off. I'm sure there is a way, but none of my "natural language" attempts are…
It's a problem that will be solved better and better as technology improves. GPT-3 is holding a lot of promise in taking input from one domain (language) and generating an outcome in a different domain (commands).
Not sure how bad/good Alexa is, but everyone (myself included) in my household are talking to Google and Siri all the time to do tasks that would have taken multiple clicks on a screen, and a bunch of typing. A huge reduction in friction. The state of the art isn't perfect, but as it improves, it's undoubtedly taking UX in a direction that is popular and desirable to consumers.
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#150Earlier 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."
The design of a hammer has actually changed substantially over time. More recently, there's been a trend towards specialization in the framing hammer alone. 100 years ago most hammers looked like the classic hammers I remember from childhood: relatively small, sharply curved claws, a smooth face. As production framing exploded in the US after WWII, framers were pushing for more efficiency. The framing hammer got heav…
They're actually not that different. specialization not withstanding, it's a handle with a perpendicular weight at the end. 40% down this page is one from 20,000 years ago, instantly recognizable as a hammer. http://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2015/12/baba-hammer-a...