Operating systems
I’m no Mac fanatic, but this Windows knowledgebase article is a perfect illustration of what’s wrong with Windows. Can you imagine Apple issuing a fix like: “In the Open box, type ‘Regsvr32 urlmon.dll’?”
Admittedly, Sun’s Project Looking Glass is more of a platform (er, a prototype of a platform) than a finished product, but they’re still going to have to do better than letting you rotate flat windows and write on the back to get people excited about a “3D Desktop.”
GUIdebook is “a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing as many Graphical User Interfaces as possible.”
Dan Hill has an excellent thought-piece on the merits and pitfalls inherent in Apple’s design ethos of perfection. He’s also collected thoughts and links on the idea of adaptive design (i.e. designing for adaptation). From the article:
In essence, adaptive design is about designing to enable the user to change things. You strive for ‘good enough’ as a starting point, such that the user feels they have a ‘way in’, almost an implicit goal of working through the finished design themselves. It sees design as a social process, developing over time, via a relationship with the user. It draws heavily from [Stewart] Brand’s idea of separating a building’s architecture into 6 different layers, from slowly developing layers through to relatively quickly moving layers.
Been using Panther for a few days now and I don’t have a lot to say, which may not be so bad: it’s a bundle of incremental improvements. One of which is Exposé. Now, Jason suggests an improvement to Exposé, but I have to disagree (at least in part; I definitely don’t think it’s perfect). I think there are actually several different types of application-switching. I love Cmd-Tab for the 900 times a day, I know where I’m going type of switching. What I’m finding Exposé extremely useful for is the now-what-was-I-just-doing type of switching. Like when you type a URL in Safari to call up the menu of your favorite lunch spot and then the phone rings and then you check email. That’s the time you really want to see everything you were doing all spread out on your “desk.” This of course brings to mind Apple’s old piles idea, which, I imagine, is where Exposé came from in the first place.
From MIT, Haystack “is a tool designed to let every individual manage all of their information in the way that makes the most sense to them.” On a cursory glance, some of what they’re doing looks interesting, although I generally mistrust the “one app for everything” approach. I think Apple is on a better track with individual UIs for specific data types, but obviously there needs to be some glue between them. So, I don’t see a single UI handling both photos and email messages, but I should be able to search both of them, to link them, and so on. Anyhow, seems well worth a look. (via alex)
Rumor has it that the next rev of Mac OSX may implement “piles.” For more on piles, see this Ask Tog column, this Slashdot thread, and the Apple paper on piles from CHI ‘92 (‘92!!) (PDF, link courtesy of peter).
Nadav’s rules of OS Etiquette: While booting up, an operating system should not allow user interaction before it can handle that interaction. Better to show a “please wait” screen for a few more seconds than to allow interaction that could cause system instability. It’s rather like answering the door in your underwear.
Steven Johnson identifies a fork in the operating system interface road: uniformity vs. modularity. See also, my earlier blurb about Apple’s application interfaces as alternatives to the traditional file system.
Note: this is of interest only to people who use OSX…. I’ve been annoyed with the screenshot behavior in OSX, but I just learned a couple tricks. I knew you could do Command-shift-3 to take a pic of the whole screen and Command-shift-4 to get a crosshair tool that lets you take a partial screenshot. But I didn’t know about: Command-shift-4-spacebar which gives you a camera tool that captures the specific window/menu/icon you hover over; or Command-shift-control-3 (or 4), which captures the image to the clipboard (a la Windows). Now if there were an easy way to change the default format from .pdf…
OK, this may seem like a small thing, but as of OSX 10.2, Apple has FINALLY adopted the behavior Windows uses for alt-tabbing through open programs (i.e. hitting alt-tab switches to the last program used, and then next time you hit alt-tab it switches back). This has been one of those nagging little inefficiencies in MacOS that they had stubbornly refused to change. 3 cheers for Apple for finally being confident enough to copy.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Lifestreams, but the idea of moving beyond the folder/file metaphor for organizing digital information seems inevitable. And with Apple’s iTunes (and iPhoto), that evolution has begun in earnest. I’m sure there are lots of other examples, but these apps are widely used and sure to be influential. They treat files (either mp3’s or photos) as data objects and then organize around metadata (artist, album, membership on a playlist, etc). This freaked me out at first and I spent a lot of time making sure that the underlying file system more or less matched what was in iTunes (just in case I needed to access the files independently of iTunes). But as of version 3, iTunes is willing and capable of managing the files for me. I don’t want to make too much of this, but I think this is an important, and welcome, transitional moment in operating system development history.
Bad operating systems don’t die, they get remarketed. (Thanks to Tim McCoy and The GUI Gallery)
Windows v. Mac metaphor #2,080… Windows is a tool, MacOS is a space. I actually think this explains a lot about the two different approaches to designing an OS. It’s why many things in Windows are more efficient than on a Mac, and it (partially) explains why Macs have such strong appeal to visual designers. It also helps explain the bitterness of the feud, since so much depends on your approach to your computer. There have been times in my life when I’ve approached my computer as a tool, but I’ve come to feel much more that it’s a space I inhabit (in which I spend an inordinate amount of time in fact). So, although there will be times I miss Windows’ efficiency-at-all-costs philosophy, it’s no surprise that my next computer will be a Macintosh. (OK, the fact it’s running Unix doesn’t hurt ;)
Sun’s HCI staff has released a GNOME Usability Study Report, nicely cross-referenced with Jakob’s familiar design heuristics. (via pointandgrunt, my favoritely-named weblog)
Visually browse your file system by file size with SequoiaView. (via InfoArchitektur)
Windows XP’s smart tags. I say EEK! .. and, er, YECCH!
taylor has some very smart things to say about the ways animation and comic and video game storytelling techniques are coming together online. One of the keys here is that so much of the engrossing-ness of comics comes from their very incompleteness. By forcing (allowing?) the reader to complete them—whether filling in the action between panels or imaginatively “fleshing out” cartoony drawings—comics become to some extent the reader’s creation. Comics are not just low-frame-rate animation, nor are they a debased form of books.. There is something specific and undeniably powerful in comics’ use of visual communication, something different than either text-only or video communication (I haven’t seen it, but I wonder how the gutter is used in Time Code).
This reminds me (tangentially) of how almost no Windows users name their hard drives while absolutely all Mac users do, and what this suggests about the relationships people are forging with their computers. As taylor implies, we need to be thinking about how closure works in human-computer interaction. What makes one interface design more identifiable-with than another? What goes on in the fuzzy borderland between tools and agents and locations?
While I was supposed to be “focusing my energy” at the end of yoga class this morning I was instead thinking about the ILOVEYOU virus (which as aaron pointed out would have been way cooler if it was called IKISSYOU). I was thinking about how all the mac users who smugly pointed out that the virus didn’t affect them were totally missing the point.. They weren’t affected because they don’t make up enough of the market to have been targeted. Which got me thinking about how computer viruses are similar to natural pests where if you plant the same crop year after year you end up much more vulnerable than if you rotate your crops. Not that I’m advocating switching your email client all the time, but it does argue in favor of heterogeneity.. It’s funny to be making an argument against standardization.
Client as server gives a good overview of emerging distributed networking apps like Gnutella, SETI@home, and Freenet. (via camworld)