Re: [NTLK] Dream OS [WAS: "The iMoleskine ?" AND "Re: newtontalk Diges

I'll have to apologise in advance for use of ALL BLOODY CAPS in this,
but a lot of stuff makes me cross. Not what people here are saying,
just stuff in general. Oh, and I apologise for my own epic fail in
subject lines :)

Bryan Cantley wrote:

> I'm sure I'll be criticized about this.. But... "the actual UI can
> suck,
> hell it could be purely textual..."
>
> Ugh. I could not disagree more. The UI IS the experience interface,
> regardless of what it lets you do. Granted, the REST of what you say
> is
> golden, but to ignore the UI is to ignore ONE of the GREAT things
> about OSX
> and the Newton- REGULAR peeps will NOT care how efficient and smart
> the
> system is, if the damn UI is buggy, boring, overly complex, or..
> Heaven help
> us.. Textual.

Don't get me wrong, Bryan, I do largely agree with you, and a slick
user interface is important as a selling point. However, a graphical
approach is only one of a number of potential approaches, and a very
bad one if, for example, you happen to be blind. A natural language
textual interface could lead to a completely spoken interface very
easily, freedom from keyboards and screens and stylii and mice and -
well, you get my point.

What's important to me in systems design is not the intricacies of
where this widget should be on the screen and what happens if you
click here, but how you interact with your data, what commands are
necessary to carry out the tasks you want to carry out, and so on.
Function first, form later.

An example of EPIC FAIL form over function is much of the "Web 2.0"
"experience" - sites that simply don't work if you don't have some
bloated behemoth browser running javascript despite the fact that what
they are doing is, in fact, completely trivial and would fit quite
neatly into the existing HTTP request-response cycle. this,
incidentally, is where I believe a lot of the issues with linux,
pointed out later in this thread by Jon, lie - a perceived need to be
the same as everything else, blind following of the status quo rather
than actually thinking about the issues, problems and potential
solutions.

Here's another one. Word processors. The goal of a word processor
is, after all, to produce printed output. So why do they all typeset
so frickin' badly? It's not like computer typesetting is some
mysterious lost art, Knuth's TeX typesets beautifully and has done for
20+ years. But no, instead of major fixes to the broken NUMBER ONE
FUNCTION OF THE APPLICATION , we get minor UI tweakage and file format
churn, all sold as some major bloody innovation.

I agree with Christian, data interaction is where it's at, not
graphical "innovation" or otherwise. Not that there's anything wrong
with tailfins, and they are important (at least, they are if they are
in vogue this year), but I feel it's utterly secondary to the primary
purpose of computing.

Newton was a massive step forward in data manipulation. Almost as big
a step forward as the introduction of the relational model in
databases, the object model in software design. I could live with a
desktop machine that uses a Newton-like interface, probably more
easily than I can live with OSX, and I've been using that, as the
"best of the current choices", since 2001.

I believe the next big thing *must* come from the handheld arena, and
will slowly (or, perhaps, not-so-slowly) encroach into the desktop
environment. I have a certain amount of faith that it will come from
Apple, and that it will come soon - the pieces are in place for it to
happen right now - but maybe I'm being over-enthusiastic there.

Jon Glass wrote:
> Linux is a complete rewrite of an OS.... And better, it's done by
> geeks--guy who know and appreciate all the engineering and such that
> goes into all this--

Personally, I'd say Linux is a botch, a clone of an aging model that
has got to the point where it's sometimes as good as what it apes,
*but no better, and frequently worse*. This doesn't make it bad, and
certainly it's hard to beat at the price, but if you want something
with real engineering, you need to look at something like OpenBSD,
OSX, or even the original NT kernel.

> so why is _every_ user interfact/window
> manager/desktop environment such a slavish imitation of what already
> exists?

Because real innovation is hard, bloody hard. It's far easier to copy
what exists, to make incremental improvements on what you have. And,
of course, the free unix-a-likes are fighting not only MS and Apple
for market share, wanting to convert people (and thus "having" to
conform to the expected norms), but also infighting amongst
themselves. So what you see is a tendency to follow the current
trend, to imitate what's currently seen as "cool" (see also Vista's
Aeroglass). Don't get me wrong, in the userland ecosystem of the
Linux / *BSD world, there *are* innovations happening, but they are
low level, and more of them are coming from corporations who want to
make money than from the "geeks". And I say that as a geek myself.

There have been very few real UI breakthroughs over the years. Partly
because what we have is largely seen as "good enough", and partly
because, as I believe I may have said, innovation is hard. Developing
a new user interface paradigm takes not only a helluva lot of code,
but a lot of input and work from people with heavy theoretical skills
across a lot of domains. Then, once you've implemented it, you have
to get it accepted, to sell it as something people want to use, to
give people a reason to switch. Take, as an example, Lotus'
"Improv" / Lighthose Designs' "Quantrix" - vast impovements over the
simple spreadsheet model as implemented in Visicalc and its endless
clones, but eventually niche products (and, in the case of Improv, a
dead one).

</largely negative ramble>

Simon

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Received on Thu May 22 09:28:48 2008