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Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

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Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#51

Desktop is dead. Gamers will move to consoles and Valve-like platforms. Rest of productivity is done on a single window browser anyway. Llms will accelerate this Coders are the only ones who still should be interested in desktop UX, but even in that segment many just need a terminal window.

>productivity is done on a single window browser anyway

When I need to get productive, sometimes I disable the browser to stop myself from wasting time on the web.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#53

Desktop is dead. Gamers will move to consoles and Valve-like platforms. Rest of productivity is done on a single window browser anyway. Llms will accelerate this Coders are the only ones who still should be interested in desktop UX, but even in that segment many just need a terminal window.

>productivity is done on a single window browser anyway When I need to get productive, sometimes I disable the browser to stop myself from wasting time on the web.

And you likely open the browser that happens to be called VS Code, Figma etc

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#54

Desktop is dead. Gamers will move to consoles and Valve-like platforms. Rest of productivity is done on a single window browser anyway. Llms will accelerate this Coders are the only ones who still should be interested in desktop UX, but even in that segment many just need a terminal window.

It's not dead. It's being murdered. Microsoft, Apple, Gnome and KDE are making the experience worse with each update. Productive work becomes a chore. And the last thing we need is more experiments. We need more performance, responsiveness, consistency and less latency. Everything got worse on all 4 points for every desktop environment despite hardware getting faster by several orders of magnitude.

This also means that I heavily disagree with one of the points of the presenter. We should not use the next gen hardware to develop for the future Desktop. This is the most nonsensical thing I heard all day. We need to focus on the basics.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#55

Desktop is dead. Gamers will move to consoles and Valve-like platforms. Rest of productivity is done on a single window browser anyway. Llms will accelerate this Coders are the only ones who still should be interested in desktop UX, but even in that segment many just need a terminal window.

For content consumption sure. For content creation though, desktop still rules.

Sounds like a dead market. Nobody needs to create content any more now that we have AI.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#56

The computer form factor hasn’t changed since the mainframe: look into a screen for where to give input, select visual icons via a pointer, type text via keyboard into a text entry box, hit an action button, recieve result, repeat it’s just all gotten miniaturized Humans have outright rejected all other possible computer form factors presented to them to date including: Purely NLP with no screen head worn augmented r…

Phone UIs are still screen UIs, but they are not desktop UIs, and that's not because of the shape of the device.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#57

For desktops, basically, yes. And that's OK. Take any other praxis that's reached the 'appliance' stage that you use in your daily life from washing machines, ovens, coffee makers, cars, smartphones, flip-phones, televisions, toilets, vacuums, microwaves, refrigerators, ranges, etc. It takes ~30 years to optimize the UX to make it "appliance-worthy" and then everything afterwards consists of edge-case features, perso…

I can think of two big improvements to desktop GUIs:

1. Incremental narrowing for all selection tasks like the Helm [0] extension for Emacs.

Whenever there is a list of choices, all choices should be displayed, and this list should be filterable in real time by typing. This should go further than what Helm provides, e.g. you should be able to filter a partially filtered list in a different way. No matter how complex your filtering, all results should appear within 10 ms or so. This should include things like full text search of all local documents on the machine. This will probably require extensive indexing, so it needs to be tightly integrated with all software so the indexes stay in sync with the data.

2. Pervasive support for mouse gestures.

This effectively increases the number of mouse buttons. Some tasks are fastest with keyboard, and some are fastest with mouse, but switching between the two costs time. Increasing the effective number of buttons increases the number of tasks that are fastest with mouse and reduces need for switching.

[0] https://emacs-helm.github.io/helm/

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#59
post #21

Unpopular take: Windows 95 was the peak of Desktop UX. GUI elements were easily distinguishable from content and there was 100% consistency down to the last little detail (e.g. right click always gave you a meaningful context menu). The innovations after that are tiny in comparison and more opinionated (things like macos making the taskbar obsolete with the introduction of Exposé).

Heh, the number of points you've probably gotten for that comment, I don't think that it's that unpopular. Win 98 was my jam but it looks hella dated today, but as you said, buttons were clearly marked, but also menus were navigatible via keyboard, soms support for themes and custom coloring, UIs were designable via a GUI builder in VB or Visual Studio using MFC which was very resource friendly compared to using Electron today. Because smartphones and tablets, but even the wide variety of screen sizes also didn't exist so it was a simpler time. I can't believe how much of a step back Electron is for UI creation compared to MFC, but that wasn't cross-platform and usually elements were absolute positioned instead of the relative resizable layout that's required today.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#60

Why didn't Star Trek ever tackle the big issues, like them constantly updating the LCARS interface every few episodes to make it better, or having Geordi La Forge re-writing the warp core controllers in Rust?

Because, something that a lot of tech-obsessed Trek fans never seem to really come to terms with, is that Trek didn't fetishize technology. In the Trek universe, LCARS wasn't getting continuous UI updates because they would have advanced, culturally, to a point where they recognized that continuous UI updates are frustrating for users. They would have invested the time and research effort required to better understan…

LCARS was technically a self-adapting system that was personalized to a degree per user. So it was continuously updating itself. But in a way to reduce user frustration.

Now, this is really because LCARS is "Stage Direction: Riker hits some buttons and stuff happens".

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