::scr Dressing up the computer

[Simon Wistow]

On Fri, Mar 08, 2002 at 10:11:04AM -0800, celia romaniuk said:
> Actually, it's 'WIndows Icons Menus Pulldowns'. Oh, hold on, it might well
> be both:

See also the less confusingly marked-up : 

http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=wimp

The first time I ever heard the term was on RiscOS which didn't have
pulldowns. The Menu I've always discarded because you could (did) have
them in text based interfaces.

But I digress. Everybody knows what I'm talking about.


> I've been doing a lot of reading into taxonomies and controlleed
> vocabularies for web site/intranet content. 

There's a good article on topic mapping at 

"Quick and dirty Topic Mapping"
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/webservices/2002/01/01/topic_map.html  

which is interesting to me as an implementor rather than a designer
because it espouses the 80% is better than 100% rule (which sounds like
a very Joel Spolsky thing to say but bear with me anyway) ... basically
it warns against designing taxonomies which are too detailed and make
them grow organically. 

Going back to searching on meta-data as a method of organising data (and
I believe Sherlock tries to do this but then I try not to use Macs
whenever possible) this leads us neatly onto Pet Topic #3 on ::scr -
desktop bots.

For the newcomers who haven't heard this all before read ...

http://www.thegestalt.org/scr/old/msg00040.html

and

http://www.thegestalt.org/scr/old/msg00050.html

and

http://www.thegestalt.org/scr/old/msg00367.html

(yes, there are two archives, don't ask, there is a reason)

By having some sort of natural language parser that can build queries
from sentences (either typed or spoken) and then search your data base
(space deliberate) for that data

"hey, computer, find my tax return from 2 years ago"

... which is now an oppurtunity for Arvid to start talking about NLP
(and also the reason why I'm pestering him for some code he's written
for a project so that I can try and then get it into a bot and see how
it reacts to being exposed to an IRC channel [0]
full of psychotics, alcoholics and goths).

The two questions I have are :

1. How does this jive with the general hatred of the Microsoft style
adaptive menus - having stuff change from underneath you?

2. How would this work with data that *needs* to be structured - like
source code?

Simon

[0] Which is an especially interesting problem since IRC t47k is a weird
sub/super set of english.


-- 
: fast, cheap and out of control