Posted by Calixte Pictet | 0 comments
10/GUI: Rethinking the Interface
It seems we are entering a new era of GUI innovation. Apple brought the dock and widgets some time ago and now KDE is re-inventing the latter with “Plasmoids“. Microsoft is having fun with “Aero-Shake“, and invented the ribbon interface. Google rethought tabs. Most of this is great, but for the most part, the desktop we use everyday is still the same. Does the future hold some real changes? I have been wondering for some time when the desktop metaphor would be replaced. You have to admit that it’s getting pretty old. Apparently, I’m not the only one thinking that:
“Over a quarter-century ago, Xerox introduced the modern graphical user interface paradigm we today take for granted. That it has endured is a testament to the genius of its design. But the industry is now at a crossroads: New technologies promise higher-bandwidth interaction, but have yet to find a truly viable implementation.”
A more interesting question is how will future interfaces break this desktop paradigm. Clayton Miller has an interesting proposal, and one who (almost) completely eliminates traditional windows from the equation. His concept is 10/GUI and it holds nothing revolutionary, but his proposition is a good combination of existing technologies that could work together to make the user experience more intuitive. Software and hardware are meant to work together (as Steve Jobs guessed very early) and the best inovations will probably originate from an alliance of both. What Mr. Miller is proposing is to rethink the use of multitouch, or rather to rethink our “desktop” to make it more intuitive, knowing that “multitouch” is ready. The pad he is proposing (almost) already exists (multi-touch “track-pads” like in MacBooks or other laptops are becomming ever more popular), and the GUI features are not truly hard to implement. The author speaks admiratively of the great invention the mouse has been. However, he thinks things are bound to change:
“[...] The shift to another interaction paradigm is inevitable. Just as the advent of the mouse and windowed GUI opened many new doors, so will the next generation of interfaces after that.”
I couldn’t agree more. The mouse is one of the greatest inventions of the past century. It has provided us with a simple way to interact with computers (through the cursor) and is still the best way to do so today. But technology never sleeps (well, almost never), and different ways to interact with our GUIs have appeared. The pointing stick is still popular of IBM computers among others, and the touchpad is omnipresent in laptops. One of the latest innovations, multitouch trackpads, has given a new dimention to GUI interaction (and to the mouse too with the awkwardly named “Magic Mouse”). However, even multi-touch is limited to one point of interaction. What 10/GUI proposes is to use the full potential of multitouch by having multiple (up to 10) points of interaction. Concurrently, C. Miller proposes “Continuum”, a new GUI that he deems more natural and less cluttered (I’m not sure I agree). Here’s the explanatory video:
Now which company is going to take the risk to really innovate?
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