::scr Dressing up the computer

[alorenz]

David Cantrell said:
>I was referring to the - IMO misguided - attempts to overuse metaphors like
>the desktop or the studio or the kitchen, and also to attempts to dumb them
>down in an attempt to make them usable immediately by everyone.  It is an
>inescapable fact that they are damnably complicated tools which we use for
>performing damnably complicated tasks.  Any attempt to do away with that
>will only make them *harder* to use - and the benefit of making the first
>few days of use that much easier is not a price I am willing to pay.

agreed. easy to learn != easy to use. I've never been able to test ride
BeOS, but the idea of organizing things by their attributes rather than in
a tree-like hierarchy looks like a very, very good thing to me, and I don't
even think it would be any harder to learn or "too complicated" for
newbies. to most people, the most familiar/easy-to-learn way of organizing
things would be not to organize them (looking at the piles on the (real)
desktops here), but that's something a computer just can't do.


>I am
>already comfortable with both the command line and the GUI, no doubt I
>would mix n' match the best from both worlds.  The end result would likely
>have an architecture somewhat similar to Unix and provide GUI features
>somewhat similar to BeOS.  Use of the character string 'desktop' would
>trigger an NMI causing the machine to catch fire.

=)

>It's not possible to dress a tool up as something it is - it just IS what
>it is and doesn't need dressing up.

sure, if you mean the kitchen metaphor by "dressing up", then yes - nobody
needs that. it's an advertising gimmick and no more. still, "GUI features
somewhat similar to BeOS" are also a representation of something more
abstract (or perhaps more concrete), like 01101010 ... I know you said you
don't have "the answer" (and I obviously don't have it either), but I doubt
whether one could define "what it is" that easily. doesn't "what it is"
entirely depend on how you represent it ("dress it up")? and doesn't a
speech/vision/gesture-driven interface require an even higher degree of
"dressing up"? or would you construct the whole system from the ground up
on the basis of spoken language (instead of written language the way it's
now) and if so, how would you then represent the audio data ... if not in
0s and 1s I mean?


- angela



>Also on voice recognition:

oh, this reminds me of something:
http://fals.ch/fXz/z1.pl/?fz=1678

fun with mac voice ... probably horribly OT, but still good.

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