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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]

#81

Post by NetOpWibby »

scottjenson wrote: post #2

I've given dozens of talks, but this one seems to have struck a chord, as it's my most popular video in quite a while. It's got over 14k views in less than a day. I'm excited so many people are interested in desktop UX!

Fantastic talk, I found myself nodding in agreement a lot. In my research on next-generation desktop interfaces, I was referred to Ink & Switch as well and man, I sure wish they were hiring. I missed out on the Xerox and Bell Labs eras. I'm also reading this book, "Inventing the Future" by John Buck that details early Apple (there's no reason the Jonathan Computer wouldn't sell like hotcakes today, IMHO).

In my downtime I'm working on my future computing concept[1]. The direction I'm going for the UI is context awareness and the desktop being more of an endless canvas. I need to flesh out my ideas into code one of these days.

P.S. Just learned we're on the same Mastodon server, that's dope.

---

[1]: https://systemsoft.works

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

#82

Post by esafak »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #66
ares623 wrote: post #9

Are we stuck with the same toothbrush UX forever?

I was going to say "are we stuck with the same bicycle UX forever". Because we've been stuck with the same bicycle UX for like 150 years now. Sometimes shit just works right, just about straight out of the gate.

This is what bicycles originally looked like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocipede#/media/File:Velocip...

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

#83

Post by DonHopkins »

Golan Levin quotes Joy Mountford in his "TED Talk, 2009: Art that looks back at you":

>A lot of my work is about trying to get away from this. This a photograph of the desktop of a student of mine. And when I say desktop, I don't just mean the actual desk where his mouse has worn away the surface of the desk. If you look carefully, you can even see a hint of the Apple menu, up here in the upper left, where the virtual world has literally punched through to the physical. So this is, as Joy Mountford once said, "The mouse is probably the narrowest straw you could try to suck all of human expression through." (Laughter)

https://flong.com/archive/texts/lectures/lecture_ted_09/inde...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_Levin

https://www.flong.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Mountford

https://www.joymountford.com/

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

#84

Post by cons0le »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #15
analogpixel wrote: post #8

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…

>Because the way we do things now is immature. It's driven often by individual developers' needs to leave their fingerprints on something, to be able to say, "this project is now MY project", to be able to use it as a portfolio item that helps them get a bigger paycheck in the future.

AKA resume-driven development. I personally know several people working on LLM products, where in private they admit they think LLMs are scams

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

#85

Post by ErroneousBosh »

esafak wrote: post #82
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say "are we stuck with the same bicycle UX forever". Because we've been stuck with the same bicycle UX for like 150 years now. Sometimes shit just works right, just about straight out of the gate.

This is what bicycles originally looked like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocipede#/media/File:Velocip...

Yes, something like 200 years ago.

By the 1870s we'd pretty much standardised on the "Safety Bicycle", which had a couple of smallish wheels about two and a half feet in olden days measurements in diameter, with a chain drive from a set of pedals mounted low in the frame to the rear wheel.

By the end of the 1880s, you had companies mass-producing bikes that wouldn't look unreasonable today. All we've done since is make them out of lighter metal, improve the brakes from pull rods to cables to hydraulic discs brakes, and give them more gears (it wouldn't be until the early 1900s that the first hub gears became available, with - perhaps surprisingly - derailleurs only coming along 100 years ago).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_bicycle

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

#87

Post by danans »

calmbonsai wrote: post #18

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…

> Take any other praxis that's reached the 'appliance' stage that you use in your daily life from washing machines, ovens, coffee makers, cars ...

I wish the same could be said of car UX these days but clearly that has regressed away from optimal.

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

#88

Post by kvemkon »

sprash wrote: post #54
whatever1 wrote: post #48

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 th…

> Gnome

I can't imagine what I'd be doing without MATE (GNOME 2 fork ported to GTK+ 3).

Recently I've stumbled upon:

> I suspect that distro maintainers may feel we've lost too many team members so are going with an older known quantity. [1]

This sounds disturbing.

[1] https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/issues/1863#issuecommen...

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

#89

Post by johnea »

A) I'm not going to watch the video because it's hosted by goggle, and I'm not interested in being goggled.

B) However, even without watching the video, it must be describing corporate product UI, because in the free software world, there is a huge variety of selections for desktop (and phone) UI choices.

C) The big question I continue to come back to in HN comments: why does any technically astute person continue to run these monopolistic, and therefore beige, boring, bland, corporate UIs?

You can have free software with free choice, or you can have whatever goggle tells you...

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

#90

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

gtowey wrote: post #34
linguae wrote: post #24

I enjoyed this talk, and I want to learn more about the concept of “learning loops” for interface design. Personally, I wish there were a champion of desktop usability like how Apple was in the 1980s and 1990s. I feel that Microsoft, Apple, and Google lost the plot in the 2010s due to two factors: (1) the rise of mobile and Web computing, and (2) the realization that software platforms are excellent platforms for mil…

It's because companies are no longer run by engineers. The MBAs and accountants are in charge and they could care less about making good products. At Microsoft, Satya Nadella has an engineering background, but it seems like he didn't spend much time as an engineer before getting an MBA and playing the management advancement game. Our industry isn't what it used to be and I'm not sure it ever could.

I have heard a big factor is that a lot of the newer devs don’t really use desktop OS outside of work. So for them developing a desktop OS is more of an abstract project like for me developing software for medical devices which I never use myself.
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