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The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)

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Re: The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)

#31

Post by xanderstrike »

userbinator wrote: post #12
smacktoward wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows are gone Ehhh, yes and no; as mobile OSes have gotten more multitasking-friendly they've moved towards the "card" metaphor, in which each app runs in a card and there's some method for shuffling between them. And a card is really just a window that's maximized 100% of the time. (Which is how most general users use windows on the desktop, so they're not losing much.)

Hopefully the reason for a lack of windows on mobile devices is because their screens are too small to manipulate them effectively with a finger. Which is how most general users use windows on the desktop, so they're not losing much. I've noticed this too, and it's puzzling - I've seen people maximise browsers on large monitors and end up with a narrow column of text surrounded by tons of blank space, or the more dif…

It depends a lot on your screen size. Below ~19" I just keep everything maximized and use hotkeys to rapidly switch between windows. I'm usually flipping between a text editor and web browser. On even a rather large laptop, 50% of the screen width is too small for web pages. Unless you're doing data entry I doubt you're memorizing the contents of one window to input it in another, and if you're doing that copy/paste exists.

Re: The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)

#32

Post by jjoonathan »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #7
jjoonathan wrote: post #3

Perhaps it's an interesting examination of co-evolution between the computer, the GUI, and the and user, but the central thesis is silly. If the inversion process you use to arrive at "anti-" statements is poorly defined, you are free to make them mean anything you wish. In this case, they were made trivially equivalent to the aforementioned evolution. There's nothing wrong with this except that the author then expec…

Did you notice that it was published 20 years ago.

Yes, I did.

Re: The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)

#33

Post by mrsteveman1 »

hrktb wrote: post #21
vbezhenar wrote: post #5

> We seem to have settled on the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) model, and there is very little real innovation in interface design anymore. It's an interesting exercise to compare this to the mobile platforms, e.g. iOS. Windows are gone. Icons are here. Menus are changed. Pointer is changed too (your finger is pointer, not an abstract arrow). Though on OS X desktop I don't see any innovations at all! May be I…

> Probably gestures are an innovation, but it isn't used widely except in operating system windows manager and Safari I give a lot more credit to the multitouch trackpad. Gestures are a great (and they work basically anywhere there are clear 'back'/'forward' navigation actions), scrolling is actually more efficient and painless than with one or more wheels; we also got rid of physical fixed buttons. I initially switc…

Did you ultimately find that the magic trackpad helped with RSI issues?

Re: The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)

#34

Post by Zigurd »

This is an interesting fossil of an extinct branch of UI. Mobile touch UI fulfilled a small number of these suggested changes, and mostly for good reasons:

1. UI has been sliding toward metaphor and abstraction, away from "reality" because aping reality on a screen doesn't work.

2. Direct manipulation is good, and it got better with touch. Babies grok it. So can your PHB. Apps need more of it.

3. Ever eat in China? Several spoken languages. Menus have pictures and you can point if you don't share a spoken language with the waiter. This works. It is often faster than using voice assistants and commands.

4. He gets this one right: consistency is overrated. Be instantly learnable and explorable. OTOH Android is trying to bring a dress code to the bazaar.

5. OK, good. WYSIWYG has given way to a "reflow" compromise. Nobody think in terms of printed pages anymore. BUT Nielsen's love for XML-based markups is weird. They all suck and I have the scars, from O'Reilly's book production workflow, to prove it.

6. Nielsen gets this the most right. Anticipation of user needs suffuses modern mobile OSs.

OK, and so on... I also think he gets modelessness wrong. Give you boss vi. "It's really good, I use it all the time." See how that works out for you.

Re: The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)

#35

Post by m_mueller »

One thing that almost always gets overlooked when critizing / trying to innovate on Xerox Parc-like interfaces, is discoverability. Look at departures from this interface (or predecessors of it) and you'll almost always find a system where it's hard for users to discover what they can do and how their actions will affect the state. Most prominently:

* iOS style gestures

* Office Ribbons (where has my feature XY been moved to? I guess I have to google now..)

* CLI (what does parameter -p do again?)

* Metro style swipes

* Voice commands

The only interface that has improved on discoverability so far, is OSX, especially with its integrated spotlight search in each application's help menu.

What I'd like to see is a CLI that (a) understands objects by default (i.e. PowerShell) and (b) is discoverable, for example by using mouse interactions when you're trying to learn.

(a) would mean that the command line applications become much easier to compose. Imagine something like list / dict comprehensions in the command line:

ls | [entry.created for entry in $@ if entry.filename[0] == 'a'] | sort

(b) would mean that you could hover each of the commands above, inspect the possible parameters, default values, examples without having to execute anything. The whole interface could get much richer as well, for example if the output of your commands is a list of objects that have the same attributes (e.g. `ls`), it would display it in a table where each column is sortable using gasp the mouse.

Re: The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)

#36

Post by Zigurd »

userbinator wrote: post #4

We predict that people who have grown up with computers will be much more capable as computer users than the current generation of users. Thus, they will be able to use (and will in fact, demand) expressive interfaces with advanced means of expressing their wants. How unfortunate that this did not turn out to be the case, and I think it's likely that is because most people liked the "simple and easy" Mac-like UIs wit…

Not me. I want a more visual, more direct-manipulation, more graphical IDE. Goose, gander, sauce.

Re: The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)

#37

Post by jrochkind1 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #5

> We seem to have settled on the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) model, and there is very little real innovation in interface design anymore. It's an interesting exercise to compare this to the mobile platforms, e.g. iOS. Windows are gone. Icons are here. Menus are changed. Pointer is changed too (your finger is pointer, not an abstract arrow). Though on OS X desktop I don't see any innovations at all! May be I…

I'm pretty sure there are more "mobile" (smartphone and touch-tablet) devices being sold than there are desktop+laptop devices being sold. And this probably isn't going to change.

So I expect desktop to keep stagnating. At some point the 'standard' desktop UI will probably merge somehow with the sorts of UI used on mobile instead.

Re: The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)

#38

Post by jrochkind1 »

smacktoward wrote: post #10
vbezhenar wrote: post #5

> We seem to have settled on the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) model, and there is very little real innovation in interface design anymore. It's an interesting exercise to compare this to the mobile platforms, e.g. iOS. Windows are gone. Icons are here. Menus are changed. Pointer is changed too (your finger is pointer, not an abstract arrow). Though on OS X desktop I don't see any innovations at all! May be I…

> Windows are gone Ehhh, yes and no; as mobile OSes have gotten more multitasking-friendly they've moved towards the "card" metaphor, in which each app runs in a card and there's some method for shuffling between them. And a card is really just a window that's maximized 100% of the time. (Which is how most general users use windows on the desktop, so they're not losing much.)

> And a card is really just a window that's maximized 100% of the time.

Ah, but that's not a 'window' at all in fact. That's how things worked _before_ the innovation of the 'window' UI, one 'screen' on the monitor at once, but maybe you can switch between them. The whole point of "windows" as a UI element is that it's not that.

> (Which is how most general users use windows on the desktop, so they're not losing much.)

It may indeed be that windows have not been a particularly successful UI pattern after all. :) Apple seems to tentatively trying to see if they can move away from them on desktop too, making it more like iOS, with the OSX full-screen mode.

Re: The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)

#39

Post by hayksaakian »

m_mueller wrote: post #35

One thing that almost always gets overlooked when critizing / trying to innovate on Xerox Parc-like interfaces, is discoverability. Look at departures from this interface (or predecessors of it) and you'll almost always find a system where it's hard for users to discover what they can do and how their actions will affect the state. Most prominently: * iOS style gestures * Office Ribbons (where has my feature XY been…

At least good CLI programs have a help command that spells out exactly what they do. Or even a man page.

Re: The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)

#40

Post by m_mueller »

hayksaakian wrote: post #39
m_mueller wrote: post #35

One thing that almost always gets overlooked when critizing / trying to innovate on Xerox Parc-like interfaces, is discoverability. Look at departures from this interface (or predecessors of it) and you'll almost always find a system where it's hard for users to discover what they can do and how their actions will affect the state. Most prominently: * iOS style gestures * Office Ribbons (where has my feature XY been…

At least good CLI programs have a help command that spells out exactly what they do. Or even a man page.

Yes that's mostly enough for simple cases, but have you ever tried to discern a gcc command with 12 compilation flags enabled? It takes you half an hour to find everything you need in the man pages. 30 years after the wide scale spread of pointer devices this is IMO just ridiculous.
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