Re:20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
by erikpukinskis on Thursday December 22, 2016 @11:03PM
(#13242743)
> right now nothing does that better than a large display which lets me interact with multiple applications simultaneously
Well, the command line is already more powerful, if less accessible. Piping streams together, writing code. These are very powerful things that would give you superworkers if your staff could do them. People stopped developing command line UIs because there was a gold rush on WIMP, so command line usability stopped getting funded. It's also just proven a hard nut to crack. People in academia have been trying and failing a more usable command line for a long time. Seems like just a matter of time to me though. It's only been 20 years.
Mobile is interesting, not because it is particularly better at anything, but just the opposite: there's no space on the screen, so it forces designers to reconsider more stream-based UIs. I.e., return to the command line paradigm and pick up where we left off in the 80s. WIMP and big screens give designers a bunch of idioms to rely on, and lots of space to fill up and they get lazy.
VR doesn't inherently do a whole lot more than a rectangular screen in terms of productivity. I think most VR UIs will be things you could make a rough approximation of on a desktop screen, minus immersion. But it's a playground in which to explore interaction ideas that will become the fundamentals of AR....
AR is where there is a new idea, which is that you can leave things lying around in space. A desktop is a window, and a relatively small one at that. You have to keep tidying it up. You waste a lot of time context shifting. Most workplaces are much larger than the few square feet a desktop provides. The killer feature of AR is basically just "spread out".
So, combine those three things... stream-based UI, with programming features (iteration, DSLs, pluggable objects), and then spread that out into space and I think you get something that will make desktops seem quaint.
Lots of human-computer interaction PhD dissertations between here and there though.
Well, the command line is already more powerful, if less accessible. Piping streams together, writing code. These are very powerful things that would give you superworkers if your staff could do them. People stopped developing command line UIs because there was a gold rush on WIMP, so command line usability stopped getting funded. It's also just proven a hard nut to crack. People in academia have been trying and failing a more usable command line for a long time. Seems like just a matter of time to me though. It's only been 20 years.
Mobile is interesting, not because it is particularly better at anything, but just the opposite: there's no space on the screen, so it forces designers to reconsider more stream-based UIs. I.e., return to the command line paradigm and pick up where we left off in the 80s. WIMP and big screens give designers a bunch of idioms to rely on, and lots of space to fill up and they get lazy.
VR doesn't inherently do a whole lot more than a rectangular screen in terms of productivity. I think most VR UIs will be things you could make a rough approximation of on a desktop screen, minus immersion. But it's a playground in which to explore interaction ideas that will become the fundamentals of AR....
AR is where there is a new idea, which is that you can leave things lying around in space. A desktop is a window, and a relatively small one at that. You have to keep tidying it up. You waste a lot of time context shifting. Most workplaces are much larger than the few square feet a desktop provides. The killer feature of AR is basically just "spread out".
So, combine those three things... stream-based UI, with programming features (iteration, DSLs, pluggable objects), and then spread that out into space and I think you get something that will make desktops seem quaint.
Lots of human-computer interaction PhD dissertations between here and there though.