::scr Drooling GUI

[Simon Batistoni]

On 07/03/02 11:46 +0000, Simon Wistow wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 07, 2002 at 11:36:21AM +0000, Clifton Evans said:
> > Or at least too specific for most people. Or all people. Artists would
> > prefer a studio metaphor. Gamers an arcade metaphor. Chefs a kitchen
> > metaphor. And so on.
> 
> Ironically, we used to have that. Back in the good ol' days applications
> took over the whole computer - on my ST if I wanted to draw I booted
> using the Dega Elite disk and my entire computer became a drawing box,
> music I stuck in Cubase and it was a sequencer, games, I stuck in Head
> over Heels etc etc.
> 
> However that was possible because the apps were small and fast to load
> and people needed all the valuable memory that the OS was taking up.
> 
> I don't think that's possible anymore because nobody wants to reboot
> everytime they want to switch tasks (and let's face it, how many times
> to you stay in Photoshop all day, even just to read your email).

Hmm. This is kinda interesting. When Kate (my invaluable programmer) came to
work for me, she hadn't really used a GUI system. Ever. She was most at
home, on various unixes, with a copy of screen running, flipping between
full-screen text-based apps as and when she needed them.

Using this model, her machine was only ever a Typing Box, or a Mailing Box,
or a Realtime Chat Box at any given instant, rather like the old ST.

The biggest difference was that these functions *are* occurring together,
and can continue in the background (an IRC conversation continues on a
particular "pane" of screen, even if you can't see it). So they have more
state than your Atari applications, and in place of your reboot, you simply
press ^a ^a or ^a ^n.

I wonder if working like this (Kate now uses X, but keeps windows fullscreen
and cycles the ones she needs to the top) would be more or less confusing
for a lot of people. Forcing required apps to the top would arguably lead to
a cleaner interface - none of those messy, overlapping windows. It would
effectively render drag-and-drop impossible, but in my experience, most
normal users don't understand drag-and-drop anyway.



As for "real life" metaphors - a chef's OS with a "fridge", a "stockroom", a
"stove"... I have two words for you, "Microsoft" and "Bob". It ain't
pretty.[0]

The only way of making this possible, and commercially viable (no Free
Software project would ever get the momentum to complete this
satisfactorily) would be, effectively, "skinning" a central OS suite. So,
the system ships with standard WP functions, standard email functions, etc,
etc. And it ships with "paradigm" modules which affect the way the inteface
to those functions look and behave.

So the chef who's married to the nurse could boot into Windows Ick, Chef
Mode, whilst his wife's login is configured to boot into Nurse Mode. Same
core functions, different inteface, surely?

Something tells me it would be deeply revolting.


[0] - If you've never heard of Microsoft Bob, well... there's surprisingly
little of any substance googlable about it. Try:

http://hci.stanford.edu/cs147/notes/bob.html

And somehow, preserved like a mammouth in a glacier, some optimistic sales
bumph (watch for wrap):

http://www.telecommander.com/pics/links/application%20software/microsoft/Microsoft_Bob_1_0/Microsoft_Bob_1_0.htm