Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
10/GUI
Stoic Joker:
Just wanted to interject that I find it interesting that nobody has brought up Microsoft's Surface Computing Interface (which does replace both mouse & keyboard) in this discussion.
Paul Keith:
@Stoic Joker,
It's probably because it's even way more out there compared to Courier and Natal.
JavaJones:
Hmm. I can see this is going nowhere. We'll see which of our ideas ever sees support, much less realization, but I stand by my previous arguments.
In a funny coincidence I went to Best Buy a few days ago to buy a digital camera for a friend (10% off coupon made it worthwhile over online vendors who were out of stock anyway). While I was there I saw a fairly expensive "edge touch" picture frame where you used sensors on the edge of the screen to control the settings and UI. It was... awful. :D
- Oshyan
JennyB:
Actually, I was more thinking that the command surface would also dynamically change based on the app. When you're running something like Photoshop, the main part of the panel would display Photoshop controls. When you switched apps, it would switch to a 'control panel' for that app.
Standard items like file open/close/save/print/next/previous/etc. could be assigned permanent locations (ex: an icon bank across the top of the command area) among all apps for consistency.
-40hz (October 13, 2009, 01:45 PM)
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Or a zoom-in/out gesture - screen-app-window-object?
In many respects (and much as it pains me to say it *choke*) Apple's iPhone incorporates a lot of this already. My GF just upgraded her AT&T cellular plan and got a 3G as part of the deal. Despite my general dislike of Apple for their proprietary closed platform and elitist mindset, even I have to grudgingly admit that the interface design is, for the most part, quite impressive.
But with the way most apps work these days, right now I think the alphanumeric keyboard might actually be in danger of being on the lagging edge of where interfaces are heading.
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Keyboards are actually pretty good at making multiway selections. They are superior to touchscreens because the usual choices can be made by muscle memory alone, without having to look. Whatever variety you use (standard keyboard, chord keyboard, or marking menu as with KeystrokeCE) the limit (without shifting) seems to be a 32-way choice, which is also a good limit for the number of options to display at a time.
I'm not sure if this can be done in Windows, or any other OS, but it potentially splits the program from the interface entirely. All the former has to do is provide lists of functions it makes available, which the interface device displays and selects as it sees fit; and send a list identifier at the appropriate point to tell it which list to switch to.
40hz:
Keyboards are actually pretty good at making multiway selections. They are superior to touchscreens because the usual choices can be made by muscle memory alone, without having to look.
-JennyB (October 15, 2009, 01:43 PM)
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Excellent point. I tend to like hotkeys myself.
The only problem comes when you start supporting multiple applications with widely varying sets of controls and features. You'll see this mostly in music, media, and graphics applications. Eventually you run out of logical key combinations for all the tasks you want to have a key for. Once that happens, you're forced to use arbitrary and non-intuitive ones. A good example is V for PASTE or W for CLOSE in most apps.
If you rely on muscle memory, and know that something like "alt-S" = "SORT," then what happens when another app decides it should be used for SAMPLE or SCALE or SKEW? I'm thinking along the lines of what happens when the average American gets into a car designed for the British road system. It's only mirrored so it's not totally unusable. But it's still a jolt to deal with.
The other thing is that there's a lot of research showing that most people prefer to use spatial models and functional "chunking" (ex: "Sugar is on the top left shelf next to the honey.") to remember things rather than code tags (ex: "Sugar is a sweetener. All sweeteners are coded as S-group items and are shelved alphabetically, within their group, over in section 17").
So I still think some sort of graphic control surface will ultimately win out over key combinations for the general population. That's why GUI OS interfaces became so popular. People hated command lines and hot keys. Especially for applications they used every day. A lot of early wordprocessors lost out to MSWord because they wouldn't provide their users with an alternative to key commands.
I'm not sure if this can be done in Windows, or any other OS, but it potentially splits the program from the interface entirely. All the former has to do is provide lists of functions it makes available, which the interface device displays and selects as it sees fit; and send a list identifier at the appropriate point to tell it which list to switch to.
-JennyB (October 15, 2009, 01:43 PM)
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It's very doable. But you'll probably never see something like that incorporated into the OS itself. Especially when you consider the amount of joint company cooperation that would be required to make it work. (There's a risk of violating antitrust laws for starters!)
:)
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