Post #404,117
8/18/15 2:45:54 PM
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On a new UI convention
At one time, the GUI popularized in the consumer market by the original 1984 Macintosh was lavishly disparaged by computer users accustomed to the command-line interface (which had itself been a dramatic advance in usability over the banks of toggle switches to which the earliest hobbyists were obliged to have recourse back in the day), but it went on to conquer the world, and the internets. This has not been an unalloyed blessing, since it has permitted knuckle-dragging fuckwits in the hundreds of millions to go online, thereby disproving the old saw about Shakespeare, typewriters and monkeys. These clowns would never have had the patience to master the old Usenet protocols. I speak here as a layman, compared to the rest of the regulars. It’s my understanding that if the internet could be magically rebuilt from the ground up today, it might ideally be more functional and more secure: the technologies exist to do this, viewed apart from the countervailing interests that militate against these improvements, and the sheer volume of decades and decades of cruft that would have to be cleared aside or (more likely) accommodated. On a more personal level, our screens are little changed in general from Mac 1984/Windows 1995. There have been many cosmetic and several functional enhancements, but we still have windows, menus, icons (although I think I was still in my thirties the last time I voluntarily opened a window in anything other than a list view), folders and the sundry other conventions and appurtenances we’ve known for three decades. I don’t have a problem with this—I’m approaching the end of my professional life, and will be entirely comfortable to conduct its last few years without having to deal with major paradigm shifts—but surely we’re not going to be stuck with riffs on Mac OS 1.0 (itself descended from Englebart’s 1968 “Mother of All Demos”) forever…? Or perhaps our current interface consensus is sufficiently dominant to stamp down any competitors before they establish themselves, rather as Homo sapiens sapiens has collectively contrived to displace any potentially sentient competitors from niches in which they might develop. I wonder what form that eventual paradigm shift will take. The sombre elegance of the original NeXT interface was a bold incremental step, and I wish in retrospect that OS X had not been so constrained by the old “Classic” conventions. The glimpses I’ve been afforded of Windows 10 certainly seem like a breath of fresh air compared to the recycled atmosphere of Apple’s terrarium these past fifteen years. I wonder, though, whether some genius or constellation of geniuses might be at work on a set of interface conventions that will astonish us the way that the technical experts were in December 1968 and the consumer laity in 1984. I don’t doubt that this day will come, but I hope that when it arrives I will not have grown so utterly rigid in my thinking that I’m unable to accept it. cordially,
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Post #404,126
8/18/15 10:36:53 PM
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I'd like to think that many things will get more life-like.
I seem to have a very position-dependent memory organization system. When I read books regularly, especially in school, I would often remember equations or pertinent facts by picturing where they were on the page. My filing system on top of my desk is positional as well.
When I'm doing stuff with a computer, quite often I remember where files are by where they are in a list. Like you, I don't use icons and the like (I use the "details" view in Winders). J's desktop on her Mac has about 100 folders and files on it at any given time. We haven't talked about it, but I'm sure she remembers what she's working on at the moment based on its position on the screen rather than the (relatively short) name.
The skeuomorphic design stuff that Apple spent so much time stripping out of OSX I fully expect to return. After all, look at the buzz about Virtual Reality and ever more detailed video games. Why are displays going to 5k+ and why are TVs going to 4k+? Why would we want cartoons on our desktops when the rest of the technology is going the other way?
Let me create rooms on my "desktop" where I can put stuff and take advantage of my positional memory. Don't make me use a 2D storage map when my brain works in a 3D way.
Let me change Office and any other compliant app to use a "color theme" of my choosing. Why should MS decide that I only get 3-4 color themes to choose from? Why won't Chrome let me put a active highlight border around the active window any more? Why make me stare at the top of the window to see if the color has changed from light blue to dark blue?
This isn't a GUI-issue, exactly, but it is an important part of how we interact with the machine:
Don't ever, ever block me from doing something else. Modal dialogs are evil. People in real-life multitask. They only drop everything to do one thing under rare circumstances. If I tell you to copy 300 GB of stuff somewhere else 2 minutes before I turn you off, you should be smart enough to keep track of where you are and continue when you're turned on again. If you want to install a bunch of updates, do it, but don't demand that I stop everything and reboot in 10 minutes. If I install new software, don't demand that I reboot then. Fix your software (and OS) so that software installations don't require rebooting.
Similarly, if your OS is so broken that Admin privileges are required to install software, then have a sudo-like functionality so that I don't have to "logout" and "login" as an Admin to do so. The computer is supposed to serve the user, not the other way around.
One of the fun things I miss from OS/2 (from way back in 1992) that I'm really surprised hasn't come back is "animated desktops". There was a cartoon aquarium desktop for OS/2 that was quite interesting. There would, of course, need to be some thought put into it now so that it doesn't get in the way of doing work, but it can be done. Live graphs of data, live video, soothing artistic images that morph over time, etc. There's no reason why those couldn't be desktop backgrounds. And, of course, it could be 3D-enabled to fit in with the "positional memory" stuff above.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #404,132
8/19/15 1:56:55 AM
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Cor! So much wrong, all in one place! :p
The skeuomorphic design stuff that Apple spent so much time stripping out of OSX I fully expect to return. After all, look at the buzz about Virtual Reality and ever more detailed video games. Why are displays going to 5k+ and why are TVs going to 4k+? Why would we want cartoons on our desktops when the rest of the technology is going the other way? Skeuomorphic is (thankfully) gone and will stay gone, except for novelty UIs. It's a broken metaphor; I have nieces who have grown up with touch UIs, who have no problem conceptualising The Cloud, and for whom a floppy disk is quite literally something they have never even seen. So why would it be the "save" icon? As for the positional stuff, spatial file managers are not a new thing - and you can set up both Windows and OS X to work this way (sorta). 3D? Not going to happen outside the movies. Way too slow to navigate, will give a significant fraction of the userbase motion sickness, and a complete pain in the arse to work with absent a mouse or touchscreen - aka "most of the laptops on the planet". Let me change Office and any other compliant app to use a "color theme" of my choosing. Why should MS decide that I only get 3-4 color themes to choose from? Why won't Chrome let me put a active highlight border around the active window any more? Why make me stare at the top of the window to see if the color has changed from light blue to dark blue? Because you'll make it very dark grey on black, and then you'll complain that you can't read anything any more. Providing unlimited choice means you get to support unlimited choices, and users are incredibly innovative when it comes to breaking things. Don't ever, ever block me from doing something else. Modal dialogs are evil. No, they're not. They should be used sparingly - but they have their place. More annoying and wrong is stealing focus from the user. You should never do that, unless the computer will catch fire if I don't click your oh-so-important button RIGHT NOW. Similarly, if your OS is so broken that Admin privileges are required to install software Dude. This is a feature, not a bug. If you can install software, then so can anything masquerading as you. then have a sudo-like functionality so that I don't have to "logout" and "login" as an Admin to do so Uh, Windows and OS X have this. Not really sure what your gripe is, here.
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Post #404,133
8/19/15 7:24:19 AM
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Re-rebuttal.
Skeuomorphic is (thankfully) gone and will stay gone, except for novelty UIs. It's a broken metaphor; I have nieces who have grown up with touch UIs, who have no problem conceptualising The Cloud, and for whom a floppy disk is quite literally something they have never even seen. So why would it be the "save" icon? We'll see. ;-) Why should we need a "save" function anyway? If I'm working in the real world, stuff doesn't suddenly disappear if I don't "save" it. It disappears when I throw it away. Because you'll make it very dark grey on black, and then you'll complain that you can't read anything any more. Providing unlimited choice means you get to support unlimited choices, and users are incredibly innovative when it comes to breaking things. Easy solution - "Revert to Original" and/or "Revert to Previous". The functionality is there in the code (there are a few user choices already, after all) - let users use it. [Modal dialogs are evil.] No, they're not. They should be used sparingly - but they have their place. More annoying and wrong is stealing focus from the user. You should never do that, unless the computer will catch fire if I don't click your oh-so-important button RIGHT NOW. Ok, you expressed it better. But there's too much modal stuff out there that exists because the software isn't smart enough. Quit using so much CPU power for "fancy" animation of progress bars and fix your code so that I don't have to wait while you do something that should be done in the background or should be done a different way so that it doesn't get in my way. Dude. This is a feature, not a bug. If you can install software, then so can anything masquerading as you. If I have proven to the machine that I'm me via logging in, then why do I need to prove to the machine again that I'm me to install something? It's a broken model. Use the power of the CPU to find a better way to do it. Anything that writes to memory could be a virus. Me signing in a different way doesn't mean that possibility is gone. Uh, Windows and OS X have [sudo-like functionality]. Not really sure what your gripe is, here. Our machines at work are being moved to a Winders Domain (yes, we're moving into the 1990s!) and lots of stuff is being locked down and managed remotely via ManageEngine. It's a huge annoyance to me (though I realize it's a blessing compared to what others have to put up with). "Run as Admin" doesn't seem available anymore, so I have to do the login shuffle. (And even before then, Run as Admin didn't seem to work reliably for me - not like sudo on Linux. ) If there's a way around that, it would be helpful. My $0.02. Thanks. Cheers, Scott.
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Post #404,134
8/19/15 8:25:42 AM
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Re: Re-rebuttal.
1. You need a save button because you often need to flag that the document, at this this point in time, is a new version. The alternative is unlimited persistent undo. And then you still need to be able to say "this is a version". Or you just end up creating new documents with "Document dd/mm/yyyy.docx" or whatever, which is a user reinventing the "save" button.
2. You're addressing a specific detail whilst missing the wider point - which is that unlimited (or very wide-ranging) configurability introduces significant engineering and testing overhead for very little reward. You end up introducing masses of extra effort to address the cosmetic needs of a tiny fraction of the userbase. Whilst large software companies have very large engineering resources available to them, the practical limitations of the software development process mean that large != infinite. Testing ASCott's daft colour config functionality means that at best, the whole programme shifts right and at worst, someone isn't testing J. Random Security Fix.
3. I think you misunderstand why some things are modal. Most things aren't. For example, you can happily switch away from the vast majority of long-running operations on your computer (large data transfers, software installations, etc). And anyway, most graphical processing gets shoved onto the GPU anyway. For regular desktop use, the most common activity for a computer is "sitting around waiting for the user to do something" - they're not resource-bound at all.
4. Yeah, it was you when you logged in, but is it you NOW? I could have just sidled up to your computer (in the literal physical sense or the digital sense) and start doing malevolent things to it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and so on will all ask you to prove your identity when accessing sensitive information or carrying out system-level actions at your specific behest (rather than in the background, where trust is ascertained via different channels that are non-interactive). Finer minds than ours have considered this problem.
5. Windows AD is the best available solution to networked policy management. It's the market leader for a reason - everything else is worse. Run As always worked exactly like you'd expect, as long as you knew what to expect, which is that you run in the full context of the user executing the command. sudo is the same.
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Post #404,138
8/19/15 11:39:16 AM
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Re: Re-rebuttal.
1. Computers are smart enough now that they should work the way people work, not the way they have always done things with PCs. If you want to create a new version, do so. It doesn't have to be called "save" and it doesn't have to have a floppy disk icon. Versioning can be handled by things like TimeMachine that already exist.
We had an earlier thread talking about how cheap storage is. Even back in the DEC VMS terminal days, people didn't have to worry about storage very much, and it kept track of versions automagically.
Just because PCs have always worked this way doesn't mean that they shouldn't change.
2. Meh. :-) I don't think that MS and Apple know best in all things that I look at. There's a lot of science out there on color perception and so forth. Office 2007 has all of 3 color schemes. Changing that to 12 wouldn't break them. MS could easily make it so that people couldn't choose black text on a black background, or whatever. These are easily solvable problems. They don't want to solve them because they don't want to, not because of the cost or difficulty.
If they don't want to solve the problem, they could at least not lock the OS and apps down so that third parties couldn't address that for people who want that ability.
3. There's modal, and then there's modal. Yes, most of the modal dialogs don't completely lock you out of the system. But if I'm doing a 300 GB copy of files, there's no need for the OS to throw up a modal dialog if it encounters an issue with one file. Be smart and work around it - copy the rest, give me a summary of the issues at the end. Stuff like that.
4. If my initial login was good enough to gain access to the machine, then that same type of login should, in general, be good enough to install software. If you're worried that I don't know what I'm doing, then add a checkbox to the install dialog. Having me Run as Admin or Login as Admin isn't any more secure - it just means I have to keep track of another password and that I have to waste my time. (Of course, there are situations where people shouldn't admin their machines. But the trend is that "nobody should login as admin" and that sudo is a pain or locked up. That's broken and needs to be fixed. (Yes, I know I'm yelling at clouds here.))
Amazon doesn't have me use one login to browse and another to purchase or change my payment information.
5. I don't know why we're not using Win AD. But we're not. :-/
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #404,141
8/19/15 1:35:49 PM
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number4 repudiation
without it when you hork the entire web service at your company you would say that dastardly pwysall did that when I went to lunch and forgot to log out. Forcing you to relog in with elevated privileges proves it was you, or someone with your credentials did the dirty work. Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 59 years. meep
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Post #404,144
8/19/15 1:54:52 PM
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Why does the Admin password have to be required?
It's just another password to remember.
In real life, once we have the authorization to do something, we aren't asked again and again whether we really want to do that...
Johnny has a driver's license. Johnny has a key to the car. The car doesn't ask for another key if Johnny wants to stop and get gas. "But he might put diesel in the tank and ruin the engine!!11"
Verification checks can be done differently. Make users enter a simple PIN or something, but don't make them logout and login or other mumbo jumbo in the name of "increased security". "But a PIN is just another password!" Kinda, but kinda not. We're being forced to go to complex 15 character passwords... :-/
I understand the arguments on the other side, and servers and airplanes and rockets are different. Granny's PC doesn't need the same kind of security as a nuclear missile.
I know that my annoyances aren't going to be addressed anytime soon. But things can change.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #404,160
8/19/15 7:16:34 PM
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car doesnt care if you are robbing the gas station either
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 59 years. meep
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Post #404,146
8/19/15 2:23:33 PM
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Also
Amazon *does* ask for your password again if you are, for example, looking at order status or whatnot. Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
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Post #404,148
8/19/15 2:38:30 PM
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Yes, but it's not an Admin password - just the same one.
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Post #404,149
8/19/15 2:55:24 PM
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I get the feeling you and Peter are arguing about two different things here.
Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
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Post #404,153
8/19/15 5:06:53 PM
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Wouldn't be the first time I've been confused about a conversation here. :-)
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Post #404,127
8/18/15 10:40:58 PM
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Perspicuous memory-jogging..
evoked but not concluded. I doubt that my imagination is up-to an incisive evaluation of what's Rightest? /Wrongest! about current info handling--a preposterously-Large topic to circumnavigate, since we know so little about how "our" bloody-jelloware assimilates.. Anything! (with some modest permanence.)
'68! Again. This nascent bit of information-brainstorming was occurring ..While cop adrenalin-besotted Goons were battling the demonstrators at the Demo Convention, in Year Zero (On my scale: the Ref. Point for a subsequent, un-arrested decline in all areas, of the USA unto this day.) A [-] slope, ramped-down by dead-JFK and accelerated via the other assassinations into '68, especially: taking out RFK and leaving way open for Nixon. Etc.
Talk about "the world of opposites" ... just in setting This scene, eh? What SORT-of Information is utterly-Vital, eh? ..especially: next.
Will ponder anon your points; maybe I too need to stop-worrying-and-Love-the-Bomb?
B/W Tee Vee: {{brownish fumes roil across a denuded plain ... then on to a cityscape, sirens}}
Twilight Zone? A large silvery missile-object is Stopped-in-Time, just some feet above the observer (whose Special/rilly-strange clock just found, seemed to have a button for "STOP"? IIRC) The time frame is clear: CCCP is stenciled in red letters. Un-push the STOP or ?
So Here we Are: INFORMATION next can ameliorate a variety of looming nightmares IF ONLY it can be fed somehow to those most-in-need, while simultaneously canceling-out the legions of the voluntarily demented. Need lots more lore on the B. O. S. Brain Operating system.
Nope, just off-hand.. I think that's way beyond my pay-scale, though if getting and spending remains the pay-grade-limit for the whole damn species--???--well..
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Post #404,135
8/19/15 8:53:16 AM
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Look to mobile and touchscreens
More and more apps are starting there, so I would expect changes based on multi-touch.
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