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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

#131

Post by MrEldritch »

laumars wrote: post #123
kovek wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bette…

Skype supports the regex s/search/replace/ notation as well. Which threw me off guard one evening.

Discord too.

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

#133

Post by swerveonem »

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…

It's the rediscovery of mIRC like interaction workflows.

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

#134

Post by carapace »

If you're interested in good UI design read Jef Raskin, "Humane Interface"[1].

You should also study the Oberon OS. You would have to read up[2] on it to use it[3], but it's a high point of UI elegance that has never been equaled since. (Specifically the base system plus the "Gadgets" UI extensions.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface

[2] http://www.projectoberon.com/

[3] Live in-browser Oberon system from original source code, via JS emulator for the underlying RISC CPU: https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/

------

edit:

And if you want to read a book that fell through a wormhole from thirty years in the future read: "Computers as Theatre" by Brenda Laurel.

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

#135

Post by digi_owl »

ssivark wrote: post #119
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…

Most successful interactions with Siri/Alexa/Cortana/GoogleNow also fall under the same paradigm. They have some finite number of templates/recipes that they can respond to, and just enough "NLP" to attempt a fuzzy matching between what you ask for, and the triggers to the recipes. The key point is that communication is fundamentally serial, in both voice and basic text consoles, whereas GUIs allow parallel communica…

https://www.osnews.com/story/6282

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

#136

Post by MrEldritch »

masswerk wrote: post #129
juancampa wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant: https://ilikeinterfaces.com/

Interestingly, while the site (which is great BTW – thanks for the link!) features all kind of minor UIs in 2001, the major status screens, which can bee seen in various places and scenes, are not covered in any way. (Again!)

Even more relevant - the Sci-Fi Interfaces blog, which analyzes various science-fictional interfaces in movies from an actual UI/UX standpoint.

https://scifiinterfaces.com/category/ghost-in-the-shell-1995...

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

#138

Post by LyndsySimon »

stevebmark wrote: post #39

please, god no. i've watched so many "terminal gurus" painfully hold left or right keys to jump to editing text (I use vi mode, but it still sucks). i've watched them fumble with !! to do something they think is efficient, but really slows them down. i've watched them write unreadable buggy awk scripts over the course of hours that end up not getting the job done. terminals are a classic example of fundamentally bad…

Could this be because people who are in the process of learning things like that are more apt to use them and show them off?

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

#139

Post by digi_owl »

swerveonem wrote: post #133
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…

It's the rediscovery of mIRC like interaction workflows.

IRC...

But yes, Slack is basically IRC with a built in bouncer.

And i case people wonder, a bouncer or BNC, was a personal proxy that would be running on some server somewhere, and that maintained a presence on the IRC networks for you when you logged off.

And when you logged back on, you got a log of all the traffic on the relevant channels and direct messages while you were gone.

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

#140

Post by sleepyams »

fpgaminer wrote: post #87

I wrote a comment under a different post just a few days ago. My comment got _way_ out of hand and wasn't as articulate as I had hoped. But the salient point I made with it is simple and applies equally well to this article. UI is hard. User interfaces seems really simple. Every programmer I know has looked at a UI and thought to themselves "I can code that in an hour!" and then ended up spending weeks, sometimes _mo…

Will we ever solve UI? UI is the meeting place of tech and user, and in a sense it is THE problem for humanity right now. UI informs how we tend to use the internet, and for example we are currently involved with UIs that tend towards consumption (e.g. discovery mechanisms, feeds, etc). To solve UI would imply a certain optimal way to live our lives, if that exists. I agree with you that UI is unsolved and extremely complex, but I don't think it something to be solved as much as it is the political heart of technology.
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