13 ms·

The future of UI is text

193 points by charlieirish 11y ago

SandersAK 11y ago
Makes argument for text. Uses images to illustrate point.
andreasley 11y ago
What most people don't realize is that GUI and command line aren't mutually exclusive. There's nothing preventing developers from creating apps that have a beautiful and informative GUI while providing a way to use text-based, specific commands. Use the best from both worlds. It would be great if there was a system-wide, standardized way to do this in every app, but until an OS with this ability exists, we'll just have to do it ourselves.
- omaranto 11y ago
  Well, people joke about Emacs being an OS. If you take them seriously, I think it's an example of an OS where you can run graphical applications but have a standardized way to run text-based commands from any app (using execute-extended-command, bound by default to Meta-x). It's not really practical to use Emacs as your only OS right now, but it certainly has many of the applications I need day to day: a text editor (obviously), a web-browser (that can display images, but currently does not run JavaScript), a PDF viewer, email clients, feed readers, command shells, several videogames, etc.
boundring 11y ago
Come on, nobody's used CAD programs with integrated GUI and command line both equally accessible? It's super intuitive, entirely customizable, and every button press results in a listable text record of each command with combined access to either windowed variables (spline radii, inputting coordinates for start and finish points, entering macros on the fly, routines, accessing algorithms) This has all been old news for decades. Now, adapting Autodesk's approach for other fields? Can't be impossible. Still, engineers in many fields have enjoyed such flexibility as a matter of course. Take a page from their experiences.
- rsync 11y ago
  Thank you - this is a very good point. If you are optimizing for some variable (speed, ease, movement, etc.) there are cases where each of CLI and Mouse are the best choice. For instance, selecting text: I know very well how to do this in screen, pine, vi, etc., but there's really no point and it is never the right choice. Even in a fully CLI terminal environment with not even a browser open, I do still want a pointing device for selecting text.
- elcritch 11y ago
  You make a good point. I haven't used autocad before but after trying other cad programs and being frustrated with the lack of cli control it makes sense. What you explain sounds awesome! Unfortunately, the current paradigm of tools for gui's (and even cli's) remain incredibly static and inflexible in their approach and design. It's not a problem that we don't know how to do it, as the autoccad example shows, but rather developers and companies lack the gumption to figure out how to make portable libraries and platforms based on it. By this I mean, that the autocad program would have to have some kind of dynamic data and code system with rules and an internal grammar for composing them. It reminds me of the old joke "every program evolves until it reimplement common lisp -- poorly". This can be done in C++ and java, etc, but you end up basically building your own dynamic lisp like system. This often gets encapsulated in design patterns built into complex class hierarchies. Basically, my take is that while it's possible to build on autodesk's and others examples, most efforts are either too academic and esoteric or just poorly executed. I think the culture in development is getting to a point this approach could be widely adopted.
  - userbinator 11y ago
    Funny you mention Lisp, because that's exactly what AutoCAD has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP
    - elcritch 11y ago
      Bam! And that strengthens my argument. I didn't realize they actually had a lisp embedded.
kimdouglasmason 11y ago
Waste-of-time advertisement posing as article is waste-of-time.
placeybordeaux 11y ago
This is a really shallow post, it doesn't deal with any of the complexities involved and just makes an unsubstantiated statement.
reggieband 11y ago
I very much disagree. Computing is going more and more towards integrated devices (phones, tablets, etc.) and companies are making serious investment in voice. Siri, Cortana, Amazon Fire, even my PS4 claims it can be controlled with voice. Once this reaches a certain level of utility it will become dominant. "Hey computer, open that word document I was working on yesterday. No, the one about the Davis merger". That is more a long-term goal. Currently the future of UI is physics systems. The little bit of UI animation that happens today often uses interpolation routines (e.g. easing in it's many forms). Interpolation is time based and has annoying limitations like it is hard to coordinate multiple animations, it is hard to update animations smoothly on the fly and it can be non-trivial to reverse out of an in-progress animation. I think we'll see a strong movement towards natural looking physical based movement throughout the UI.
- mbrock 11y ago
  Neal Stephenson's essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line" has this bit: > Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to make snotty comments about it—after all, I was at Disney World as a paying customer. But it clearly relates to the colossal success of GUIs and so I have to talk about it some. Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two. There's so much expertise in animation, games, 3D, physics, illustration etc while most UIs are boring, boxy, and slow. The UIs inside of simulated computers in computer games are cooler than the actual UIs! I wonder what will happen with virtual reality UIs. With movement tracking you could really get next-level point and click. I want my IDE to be a VR spaceship mission where I write code with some kind of sign language syntax!
bshimmin 11y ago
An almost comically ridiculous premise. "/partyline create:task Blah" requires a user to remember both the initial slash and then that two words must be joined with a colon, with no spaces. There's a reason why many companies have "Find us on Facebook" rather than a URL - because regular people are bad at understanding computer syntax; slashes and colons and joining up words without spaces are more or less unique to using a computer, and people who don't have to program computers for a living really don't care to learn their idiosyncrasies.
heshamg 11y ago
I agree with the idea of the article. But it will not be limited to slack, check out the home page of this Ride Sharing service for example: https://www.wadeeny.com https://www.wadeeny.com (disclosure, I am a co-founder) I am the one who designed it, and I can confidently say that engagement is way higher than using traditional forms and button. The bounce rate is extremely low, almost everyone at least tries interacting with the bot. Now this is not a testimony that text will always beat traditional web UI, I think a big factor in this case is the fact that it seems so unconventional and people are curious to try it out. Also depends on the purpose of the interface you are creating. Like 1971genocide pointed out, UI is good for giving commands and not learning for example. In our case, it was important for us to get a limited number of very precise information from the user. Therefore having a Text based interface worked out.
- mogwely 11y ago
  it is actually very interactive, and does draw people in to enter the information. I think there should be a healthy mix between UI and Text to achieve a good usability which is what you and slack do
JabavuAdams 11y ago
So graphic designers are going to use text, instead of Photoshop? Pixar artists will be switching to CLI, over direct-manipulation graphical interfaces? Sound-designers will use text to look at waveforms? The title is overly broad because it focuses on only a certain class of applications.
dahart 11y ago
Slack is not a text interface. Slack has as text interface for many common operations, but you can't ignore how much GUI Slack has. The future of UI is having graphical and text interfaces at the same time. Throw in touch, speech and sight for fun if you want. None of it is going away. Most programs need a simple and very well thought out GUI, aimed both at new users and at discoverability of features for experienced users, and more powerful text based interfaces and keyboard shortcuts for power users. This is what the best programs do now, and what Slack does too. The interesting thing about having both/multiple kinds of UI is that it guides the overall design structure of a program. Having both GUI and text interfaces forces MVC patterns to emerge, and it requires having a strong underlying foundation for your data and the operations that manipulate it. *edited for typos
atarian 11y ago
So that's why Apple products are selling so poorly.
DiabloD3 11y ago
As someone who lives in one or more terminals during the day, in my opinion, "the future of UI is text" is misleading: it is the past, present AND future.
amirouche 11y ago
A few years back there was plenty of text based interfaces like gnome-do. IIRC there is a web cli extension for firefox that is based on RDF intents which allows to command website using text.
cmadan 11y ago
Anything like Partyline for Bitbucket? :)
userbinator 11y ago
How do you reconcile this with the declining popularity of desktop and laptop computers, and the increase of smartphones, tablets, and other keyboardless touchscreen devices? I haven't noticed an increase in keyboarding skills either, which are absolutely essential to use a CLI well. I wish CLIs would become more popular amongst the general population, but it seems GUIs (which are also becoming "flatter" and less discoverable, ironically enough) have taken over completely for almost everyone.
- stagas 11y ago
  Voice recognition? So you might say, the future of UI is saying what you want to happen, either by typing it or speaking it outloud.
  - tlarkworthy 11y ago
    Doesn't work well in an office though
  - nommm-nommm 11y ago
    How many people actually prefer the "tell me why you called?" phone menus over "press 1 for billing" phone menus?
- cobweb 11y ago
  I've had a laptop with a broken keyboard, that I tried to drive with a pointer. And a system without a mouse driven with a keyboard. I was surprised how much I could do with the former. I like the terminal, and I am also a reasonable touch typist. I don't particularly enjoy typing though. I've tried a few different keyboards. And I _do_ get the power of the CLI. But I think it's a barrier to computer input. And it's a barrier to free conversation. Check Youtube comments for example. I think some of the terseness (think Twitter) results as a result of text entry being laborious. I'm not familiar with using a tablet - and I always feel somewhat restricted and impotent when using mobile devices, which I figure others feel when using a keyboard. OSs could make text entry far better and centralise it. Portable dictionaries and shortcuts for example. Yeah you can do that by keeping shell scripts on a remote, but it all feels a bit hodge podge. Jumping from one CLI to another, different apps, etc can feel nasty. And I'm personally not happy putting my primary CLI in a cloud based SILO.
meshko 11y ago
1) argue that non-power uses will love the text-based interfaces 2) support your claim with a bunch of examples from software development workflows. Sigh.
- moistgorilla 11y ago
  It's not exclusive to slack, for example: twitch chat there are a bunch of text commands that people love to use. When people use emojis and other such things they usually use a text macro. If you've noticed with programs like photoshop and illustrator, it's recommended for novices to learn all of the keyboard shortcuts. If anything this points to the future of UI being a combination of text and point and click.
  - hitekker 11y ago
    ... and touch?
  - shortstuffsushi 11y ago
    I would argue that designers (and probably most twitch users) are still quite a bit closer to power users than the average user.
  - onion2k 11y ago
    It's not exclusive to slack, for example: twitch chat there are a bunch of text commands that people love to use. People who use Twitch a lot love to use them. People who don't use Twitch much don't bother. This backs up the argument that power users like macros. When people use emojis and other such things they usually use a text macro. True, but that might be because PC keyboards don't have emoji. There's no other option. People certainly don't use a macro on mobile; they use a an emoji keyboard because that's what they prefer. If you've noticed with programs like photoshop and illustrator, it's recommended for novices to learn all of the keyboard shortcuts. There's an assumption when you're learning something with the end goal of understanding that application that you're on the first steps to becoming an expert (aka power user). If someone is only learning how to achieve a single end result they don't start with the shortcuts. For example, someone who just wants to learn how to resize and crop images in Photoshop just learns the two or three features they're going to use and then they stop. I don't know very many people outside of the software industry who are happy with a command line interface, and even fewer who're happy with macros on a command line. Also, if Partyline is the future, then I don't like it. The two examples in the article are inconsistent; /partyline create Signup endpoint is 500'ing label:bug vs /partyline create:task Write about the future of text-based interfaces Why is the first one using a "create" verb with a "bug" label and the second using a "create:task" verb? Why not "create:bug" in the first one, or "label:task" in the second?
6d0debc071 11y ago
One of the huge limitations for text based interfaces is the same as the elephant in the room for people starting programming, especially when they start dealing with others libraries/modules: It's not easily discoverable if you don't know what to look for - there's no intuition. A GUI, at least one that's reasonably well-designed, you can play around in and learn fairly quickly. Having seen the pain of many users even when trying to dig down through a GUI they're unfamiliar with, I think that while text based interface are often more powerful there's a long way to go before they're more popular.
1971genocide 11y ago
Text is good for efficiency. Not for learning. When I see a UI of an app - I can at one instant see all the possible things that can be done using it. text starts becoming a problem when their is a combinatronical explosion in what you can do with your app. I cannot imagine Photoshop, Maya or After Effects to be text based. Its a fairly interesting computer science question to me.
- dllthomas 11y ago
  "I cannot imagine Photoshop [...] to be text based." ImageMagick is amazing. There are certainly tasks for which the interface is more awkward than Photoshop (or GIMP), but there are tasks for which the opposite is true. For instance, I was easily able to write a script for "take a screenshot, detect where the variably-sized error message box appears within it and crop to it".
- detaro 11y ago
  Maya at least has strong scripting support from what I've heard. Similarly Blender. Which IMHO is a great way: have a GUI, but also have a scriptable console.
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  It should be the job of the operating system to expose a coherent and flexible set of tools, features, and UI paradigms that people can use across many different use-cases (nowadays called "apps"). Copy and Paste, although poor operators in retrospect, is such an example. Undo is an other, much better one. I firmly believe that we could reduce or eliminate most application-specific commands by increasing the standard set provided by the OS. Some kind of semantic primes that could be composed into anything. A new UI language if you will.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ddingus 11y ago
  The MEL language is a huge part of MAYA, and it's the guts that do lots of the work. Part of the magic of MAYA is the killer GUI for making models, etc... The real heavy lifting comes from the tight integration between MEL and that GUI, which permits all sorts of things to be made and then quickly manipulated using the SAME MAYA GUI.
miguelrochefort 11y ago
This is an ad for Partyline. The thesis, sadly, is poorly demonstrated. This should have been called "The present of UI input is text for this particular use case". Text (or speech) as an input method is alright when you know exactly what you want. However, this is not a very good exploration interface, where you need to interact with things that are presented in a 2D/3D space. Text also isn't very expressive when it comes to consuming content. The future of UI, in most cases, is no UI. Let some AI study and understand you, and let it make decisions on your behalf.
- meerita 11y ago
  I thought exactly the same. There are poor examples and for a strong title there is little substance.
- ygra 11y ago
  Wolfram Alpha suffers a bit from that, I think: You can query a great lot of things but for many of them it requires you to a) know about that you can query that, b) knowing how to query for that, c) how to give options, parameters. The natural language interface sounds great and makes for awesome demos (like »Wow, they can actually understand that?«), but it's horrible for discoverability, especially in cases where you can try five different ways of saying the same thing but only the sixth would actually yield a result.
  - miguelrochefort 11y ago
    The shortcomings of natural language interfaces are obvious, and I cannot understand why so many people believe it to be the future. Humanity needs a formal language, which requires formal thinking. Ambiguity is not a problem when a language is used to browse, explore and clarify thoughts, but this kind of interaction needs to be feedback-driven. You can't just input an ambiguous natural language query and expects accurate results. However, you can start with an ambiguous natural language query, and quickly make it into a formal one thanks to smart auto-completion. Only when the query reach a formal threshold should it be executed.
hberg 11y ago
Sorry, I don't buy the premise. The future of UI (for the general public) is probably voice-based like "Hey Siri/Google/etc, I'd like a sandwich" and a sandwich is ordered and delivered to you. "Tweet 'Who's down for a sandwich party?'" and a tweet is tweeted. Whenever I hear or read someone argue that "command line is the future" I think of my dad; barely able to make a bookmark in a browser and not really knowing how folders work. And he's been using a Mac for decades.
- code_duck 11y ago
  Typing to Siri or Google is essentially a command line interface.
wmeredith 11y ago
No way. I've been designing and coding interfaces for 10 years, and time after time one of the biggest constraints for what is on/off the screen is the user's memory. Want to know why the command line is hard for plebs? It's because they don't know what the options are. They don't even know what they don't know. The whole point of a GUI is to convey the possibilities. Show users a menu and they get to pick something. This isn't going to change anytime soon. At least not until terminal commands are taught in school alongside the alphabet and multiplication tables.
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  This simply is an artifact of the original design of CLI. You start by writing the command or function, and then you provide parameters or arguments. The order in which these things are provided leads to poor discoverability. Instead of starting with the command, we should start with an argument. Given a "thing" (that likely exists in your UI), such as a file, a song, a person, a chunk of text, show me the list of commands that accept it as a parameter. You'll quickly discover that a chunk of text can be passed to functions such as "tweet", "copy to clipboard", "create memo", "search on Google", "translate". Congratulations, you just invented the contextual menu, which people have been using for decades. "Things" are easy to discover; you can see them. Commands that interact with them, are not as easy to discover; you can't see them. Let people touch or name things (with or without a query language), and once they grabbed the instance they care about, show them what can be done with it. It's that simple. Before: > /tweet "some random thoughts" // where you had to know 'tweet' existed as a command After: > "some random thoughts" -> tweet // where 'tweet' was auto-suggested, along with 'search', 'translate', 'copy', etc.
  - seagreen 11y ago
    This is brilliant. Do you have suggestions for where I can go to read more about this idea?
    - mitchtbaum 11y ago
      This question seems to point in this direction of changing our shell syntax from `vo` to `ov`, based on Jef Raskin's Humane Interface http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/48051/how-to-extend-the-noun-verb-paradigm-to-multiple-nouns http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/48051/how-to-extend-th... .. I imagine pluggable shell grammars would allow open ended exploration this way.
xiaq 11y ago
The Anti-Mac Interface (http://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/ http://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/) argues for the advantage of text over GUI in a more vivid way: > The see-and-point principle states that users interact with the computer by pointing at the objects they can see on the screen. It's as if we have thrown away a million years of evolution, lost our facility with expressive language, and been reduced to pointing at objects in the immediate environment. Mouse buttons and modifier keys give us a vocabulary equivalent to a few different grunts. We have lost all the power of language, and can no longer talk about objects that are not immediately visible (all files more than one week old), objects that don't exist yet (future messages from my boss), or unknown objects (any guides to restaurants in Boston).
sperling75 11y ago
Text as UI success I believe is tied to how connected the related task is to the messaging tool you are in and how easy the platform makes it for the user. There are a number of tasks that could be good text candidates in a slack interface such as project management, time calendaring, tools used by the slack team. I think it's silly to jump to the conclusion that text is the future of ui. I would agree that text is making a come back for relevant tasks within popular messaging tools.
striking 11y ago
Text is good, but not for everything. How would you represent a tree or graph data structure in text to a human and let them manipulate it? I understand that this works for some things. A command-line interface is good for giving commands! Yet using it to paint is a lot harder. Essentially, text interfaces are good at manipulating text. As a software developer you're often manipulating only text. So you think text interfaces are good, always. This is a syllogistic fallacy.
- jameshart 11y ago
  As a software developer, you're actually manipulating abstract concepts about the future movement of data over time. The best way we've come up to do that is to describe those concepts using textual languages, and then build ourselves tools for manipulating text in the belief that that gets us closer to manipulating those concepts. This has the effect that we actively reject some really good tools as being 'unsuitable for programming' because they are hard to work with with our text based tools. I think there's a lesson in both directions here: the fact that often the kinds of tools software developers use could actually be of use in some other domain (lawyers could get a lot of benefit out of distributed version control and markup languages, for example), but also software developers can sometimes get caught up in text editors and command lines and forget that sometimes a nice graphical visualization or interaction is really helpful.
- wtbob 11y ago
  > How would you represent a tree or graph data structure in text to a human and let them manipulate it? Tree: '(root (left (left-left left-right)) (right (right-left right-right))) Graph: '(graph (#1=node1 #2=node2) (#2# #3=node3) (#3# #1#)) Solved problems since at least the early 90s. > Yet using it to paint is a lot harder. Sure, but drawing is only one activity among many possible activities. > As a software developer you're often manipulating only text. I think that's true for most users: they are reading articles (text); writing comments (text); sending social updates (rich text); watching videos (not text); playing games (not text, but may have textual content, e.g. in-game chat).
  - swhipple 11y ago
osetinsky 11y ago
I ask myself this question as it pertains to the future of music. Digital Audio Workstations such as Ableton Live and Logic Pro dominate the scene when it comes to making music with a computer (at least in pop music), and companies such as Splice are trying to create collaborative networks around them. Text based interfaces and audio programming languages such as SuperCollider open up a whole new world of musical creativity, and would lend themselves to collaboration (IMO) better than GUI based ones. The obvious hurdle for people is learning how to create things/music/art with text. https://supercollider.github.io/ https://supercollider.github.io/ http://sccode.org/ http://sccode.org/ music written with supercollider: https://open.spotify.com/track/4VecDB1uhp44posWgt85yN https://open.spotify.com/track/4VecDB1uhp44posWgt85yN
Kiro 11y ago
I don't think there's any substance in this claim. The examples are very niched.
- johansch 11y ago
  The whole post is just a thinly masked ad...
nthnb 11y ago
In 2007 Donald Norman wrote a piece on command-line interfaces that's pretty cogent: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ui_breakthroughcomma.html http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ui_breakthroughcomma.html Text UI is a great way to hide complexity but difficult to teach and form habits around. The learning curve is steep and probably something we need to invest more in because "have you read the man page" isn't gonna cut it for most.
ddingus 11y ago
I personally would frame this as "the console" and it's the place where one can input text in the interface, and it may well be a secondary, external channel apart from the main or primary GUI. All that has been done before. It should be done more.
bithush 11y ago
When I first used Cortana as part of Windows 10 I was quite disappointed when I found out it lacked quick commands like this. Sure it has some understanding of what is written such as "remind me to call Jim at 2pm" but it is very limited. I was hoping I would be able to things like the following - * backup Fizz Buzz project (and have it intelligently backup the Fizz Buss Visual Studio project to a default location) * open Fizz Buzz issue 131 (and have it open a browser to the github issue tracker to the correct issue #) * email the Fizz Buzz project plan to Jim (you can *kind of* do this but it hardly ever works as you would want) * open Fizz Buzz todo.txt when I next login * copy the Fizz Buzz project plan to my Dropbox projects folder You know things that I will otherwise need to open the command prompt for or do some mundane UI task. Sure some of these things will require applications have such support but from what I can tell Cortana offers no real way to do this other than integrating with the Windows search service. Considering most (all?) of these things could be done with PowerShell cmdlets it is annoying there is no way to script Cortana via PowerShell in such a way. Maybe one day.
- shortstuffsushi 11y ago
  A lot of those things seem like commands specific to your environment though (read: things someone would have to develop out). Does Cortana offer some sort of API allowing you to add additional "commands" that she understands? That would be pretty neat.
  - bithush 11y ago
    I checked a few months ago but there was nothing specifically for desktop apps only universal ones and even then they were mostly voice-oriented things so you can "plug in to Bing". Ugh. As far as I can tell it is not [yet?] possible to integrate features from a classic Win32 application into Cortana to do things like I listed. Shame as that would have been very cool. My examples are very specific to my domain for sure but they were just some examples for my use, the general concept of using Cortana as an actual digital assistant to automate/speedup boring and often done tasks.
- dingo_bat 11y ago
cubano 11y ago
Multi-line chat in BBS's in the 1980s used slash-commands such as these in chat apps...I'm sure I'm not the only one here old enough to remember those. Sigh...like so many other things, what is old is new again. Forcing people used to touch interaction with their phones to grok command line UX seems more like wishful thinking then the Next Thing.
- Albright 11y ago
  Yep. Slack is a pretty poor re-implementation of IRC, and I'm pretty bummed both my previous and my current company forced me to use it. If we're going to go this route, let's at least use something not so patronizing and infantile, like HipChat. And I'm pretty sick of all these "Slack is going to change/has changed THE WORLD!!!" articles in general.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    You don't love it when software soothes you during loading screens with cuddly inspirational messages?
potatohead00 11y ago
A much more interesting discussion of this topic http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html
duaneb 11y ago
Slack is not text. Slack is an engine designed to provide multimedia in specific, arbitrary formats. The fact that you can modify things by typing text does not make an argument that the future of UI is text.... maybe event streams and highly leverage-able tools, but that's not intrinsic to text.
pjmlp 11y ago
The future is the Xerox PARC paradigm, not AT&T.
neilni 11y ago
Isn't this called ChatOps? Slack acts as an hub for all the api wrappers. Ex: you should be able to type commands that execute on behave of you rather than ssh into your machine to type the same command. The title should read the future of DevOps is chat. UI is a different topic
LukeB42 11y ago
Fortunately I've just released an ncurses wrapper that deals in printing strings exactly how they're formatted. To update the view call update_content(0,"Some\nLines.") on the appropriate Pane object. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/window https://pypi.python.org/pypi/window
tim333 11y ago
Mildly off topic but re >In the past, we thought the future of computing would look complicated: lots of buttons, multiple screens, and crazy interfaces. ... followed by a shot of the 1960's Star Trek ship's deck, then saying we're headed for command lines instead. Since 50 years have passed since that set was designed I thought I'd google how designs have changed. Here's the space shuttle http://cdn.visualnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Discovery_Flight_Deck_5.jpg http://cdn.visualnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Discove... and here's a modern ship http://www.motorship.com/__data/assets/image/0020/705404/THE-VIEW-FROM-THE-BRIDGE.jpg http://www.motorship.com/__data/assets/image/0020/705404/THE... Still looks more like lots of buttons, multiple screens, and crazy interfaces than command line to me. Still give it another half century.
brudgers 11y ago
Regardless of whether the author is right, it's worth thinking about because it may well be the case that humans have a better affinity for graphic representations of spoken language than for pictorial representations of things in the world. Ordinary people type web addresses into browsers...or heaven forfend, at least "microsoft" into their Google toolbar for IE8. There's a point at which information redundancy is overwhelming even for people who don't care about information theory or how the web works or anything else. The WIMP interface was a great innovation. But it was built for a time when women were in the typing pool, entrepreneurs were called "businessmen" and managers were afraid of catching keyboard kooties. The meteor hit and CEO's type their own correspondence and answer phone calls on their direct line [which lives in their pocket]. There's a case [and a reasonable counter case] to be made that WIMP was the installation program for widespread computing. Once the important system is up and running it can be discarded. The degree to which this is plausible correlates to the inverse to which one sees WIMP as an end in itself. Yesterday, it was rounded corners on shiny buttons, today it's flat sharp corners. In the interim, people have learned from experience that pixels can't cut human fingers. A buggy whip industry would count this as progress.
codingdave 11y ago
The headline does not match the article. The article raves about one particular feature on Slack, then shows that their tool works well with it. This is not an article about UI. This is marketing. Even worse, it is marketing that failed -- all it has done here is invoke disagreement from a tech community.
- llamataboot 11y ago
  Well, it did get an add for Partyline on the frontpage of HN. Not sure that's failing, even if people disagree with your premise.
digi_owl 11y ago
Jef Raskin[0]'s Archy[1] anyone? [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy
singold 11y ago
If the future of interfaces is foing to be text, i think it will be more because minecraft playing children than slack users, just my 2c
avodonosov 11y ago
I share this view and even use this idea in some of my projects (for example at http://testsheet.biz http://testsheet.biz the test tree is edited in a plain text form. This allows to edit several tree nodes at once, including the whole tree; and also to quickly move groups of tests around by copy/paste; to introduce new nodes quickly. So, much quicker and easier that in any tree widget). Together with intelligent completion (similar to programming environments) text UI could in many cases be significantly more convenient than widgets for mouse. And it can be much cheaper develop.
copsarebastards 11y ago
The future of Slack is that they'll do what every other chat application has done in the past 2 decades: they keep "innovating" on a solved problem, add "features" that get in people's way to the point that it becomes unusable and people switch to the new "disrupting chat technology". It happened to HipChat before Slack and I doubt Slack will break the cycle. Given that I don't think I'll be looking to Slack as "the future of UI".
tiger10guy 11y ago
https://vimeo.com/115154289 https://vimeo.com/115154289
spo81rty 11y ago
I use slack everyday. I didn't know it did any of the stuff mentioned in this article. That's the problem command line.
d08ble 11y ago
Future is the matrix. Animation CPU said, that text is form, all user manipulations will be in native form - voice, touch, think, where text is local case. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubNfWarTawI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubNfWarTawI - how UI replication will be used in the matrix http://acpul.tumblr.com/ http://acpul.tumblr.com/
mschuster91 11y ago
Bit-related sidenote: Does anyone know a way to position the cursor inside a terminal running bash when editing a command except navigating with the left/right arrow keys? This is by far the thing that eats the most time when I'm working on the commandline.
paulddraper 11y ago
The future of UI is text....specifically Hypertext Markup Language.
ranjith7393 11y ago
move to top
SZJX 11y ago
A good title to promote your product, sure, but there's little substance or truth in the claim really.

193 points by charlieirish 11y ago

Makes argument for text. Uses images to illustrate point.

What most people don't realize is that GUI and command line aren't mutually exclusive. There's nothing preventing developers from creating apps that have a beautiful and informative GUI while providing a way to use text-based, specific commands. Use the best from both worlds. It would be great if there was a system-wide, standardized way to do this in every app, but until an OS with this ability exists, we'll just have to do it ourselves.

omaranto 11y ago
Well, people joke about Emacs being an OS. If you take them seriously, I think it's an example of an OS where you can run graphical applications but have a standardized way to run text-based commands from any app (using execute-extended-command, bound by default to Meta-x). It's not really practical to use Emacs as your only OS right now, but it certainly has many of the applications I need day to day: a text editor (obviously), a web-browser (that can display images, but currently does not run JavaScript), a PDF viewer, email clients, feed readers, command shells, several videogames, etc.

boundring 11y ago

Come on, nobody's used CAD programs with integrated GUI and command line both equally accessible? It's super intuitive, entirely customizable, and every button press results in a listable text record of each command with combined access to either windowed variables (spline radii, inputting coordinates for start and finish points, entering macros on the fly, routines, accessing algorithms) This has all been old news for decades. Now, adapting Autodesk's approach for other fields? Can't be impossible. Still, engineers in many fields have enjoyed such flexibility as a matter of course. Take a page from their experiences.

rsync 11y ago
Thank you - this is a very good point. If you are optimizing for some variable (speed, ease, movement, etc.) there are cases where each of CLI and Mouse are the best choice. For instance, selecting text: I know very well how to do this in screen, pine, vi, etc., but there's really no point and it is never the right choice. Even in a fully CLI terminal environment with not even a browser open, I do still want a pointing device for selecting text.
elcritch 11y ago
You make a good point. I haven't used autocad before but after trying other cad programs and being frustrated with the lack of cli control it makes sense. What you explain sounds awesome! Unfortunately, the current paradigm of tools for gui's (and even cli's) remain incredibly static and inflexible in their approach and design. It's not a problem that we don't know how to do it, as the autoccad example shows, but rather developers and companies lack the gumption to figure out how to make portable libraries and platforms based on it. By this I mean, that the autocad program would have to have some kind of dynamic data and code system with rules and an internal grammar for composing them. It reminds me of the old joke "every program evolves until it reimplement common lisp -- poorly". This can be done in C++ and java, etc, but you end up basically building your own dynamic lisp like system. This often gets encapsulated in design patterns built into complex class hierarchies. Basically, my take is that while it's possible to build on autodesk's and others examples, most efforts are either too academic and esoteric or just poorly executed. I think the culture in development is getting to a point this approach could be widely adopted.
- userbinator 11y ago
  Funny you mention Lisp, because that's exactly what AutoCAD has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLISP
  - elcritch 11y ago
    Bam! And that strengthens my argument. I didn't realize they actually had a lisp embedded.

kimdouglasmason 11y ago

Waste-of-time advertisement posing as article is waste-of-time.

placeybordeaux 11y ago

This is a really shallow post, it doesn't deal with any of the complexities involved and just makes an unsubstantiated statement.

reggieband 11y ago

I very much disagree. Computing is going more and more towards integrated devices (phones, tablets, etc.) and companies are making serious investment in voice. Siri, Cortana, Amazon Fire, even my PS4 claims it can be controlled with voice. Once this reaches a certain level of utility it will become dominant. "Hey computer, open that word document I was working on yesterday. No, the one about the Davis merger". That is more a long-term goal. Currently the future of UI is physics systems. The little bit of UI animation that happens today often uses interpolation routines (e.g. easing in it's many forms). Interpolation is time based and has annoying limitations like it is hard to coordinate multiple animations, it is hard to update animations smoothly on the fly and it can be non-trivial to reverse out of an in-progress animation. I think we'll see a strong movement towards natural looking physical based movement throughout the UI.

mbrock 11y ago
Neal Stephenson's essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line" has this bit: > Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to make snotty comments about it—after all, I was at Disney World as a paying customer. But it clearly relates to the colossal success of GUIs and so I have to talk about it some. Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two. There's so much expertise in animation, games, 3D, physics, illustration etc while most UIs are boring, boxy, and slow. The UIs inside of simulated computers in computer games are cooler than the actual UIs! I wonder what will happen with virtual reality UIs. With movement tracking you could really get next-level point and click. I want my IDE to be a VR spaceship mission where I write code with some kind of sign language syntax!

bshimmin 11y ago

An almost comically ridiculous premise. "/partyline create:task Blah" requires a user to remember both the initial slash and then that two words must be joined with a colon, with no spaces. There's a reason why many companies have "Find us on Facebook" rather than a URL - because regular people are bad at understanding computer syntax; slashes and colons and joining up words without spaces are more or less unique to using a computer, and people who don't have to program computers for a living really don't care to learn their idiosyncrasies.

heshamg 11y ago

I agree with the idea of the article. But it will not be limited to slack, check out the home page of this Ride Sharing service for example: https://www.wadeeny.com https://www.wadeeny.com (disclosure, I am a co-founder) I am the one who designed it, and I can confidently say that engagement is way higher than using traditional forms and button. The bounce rate is extremely low, almost everyone at least tries interacting with the bot. Now this is not a testimony that text will always beat traditional web UI, I think a big factor in this case is the fact that it seems so unconventional and people are curious to try it out. Also depends on the purpose of the interface you are creating. Like 1971genocide pointed out, UI is good for giving commands and not learning for example. In our case, it was important for us to get a limited number of very precise information from the user. Therefore having a Text based interface worked out.

mogwely 11y ago
it is actually very interactive, and does draw people in to enter the information. I think there should be a healthy mix between UI and Text to achieve a good usability which is what you and slack do

JabavuAdams 11y ago

So graphic designers are going to use text, instead of Photoshop? Pixar artists will be switching to CLI, over direct-manipulation graphical interfaces? Sound-designers will use text to look at waveforms? The title is overly broad because it focuses on only a certain class of applications.

dahart 11y ago

Slack is not a text interface. Slack has as text interface for many common operations, but you can't ignore how much GUI Slack has. The future of UI is having graphical and text interfaces at the same time. Throw in touch, speech and sight for fun if you want. None of it is going away. Most programs need a simple and very well thought out GUI, aimed both at new users and at discoverability of features for experienced users, and more powerful text based interfaces and keyboard shortcuts for power users. This is what the best programs do now, and what Slack does too. The interesting thing about having both/multiple kinds of UI is that it guides the overall design structure of a program. Having both GUI and text interfaces forces MVC patterns to emerge, and it requires having a strong underlying foundation for your data and the operations that manipulate it. *edited for typos

atarian 11y ago

So that's why Apple products are selling so poorly.

DiabloD3 11y ago

As someone who lives in one or more terminals during the day, in my opinion, "the future of UI is text" is misleading: it is the past, present AND future.

amirouche 11y ago

A few years back there was plenty of text based interfaces like gnome-do. IIRC there is a web cli extension for firefox that is based on RDF intents which allows to command website using text.

cmadan 11y ago

Anything like Partyline for Bitbucket? :)

userbinator 11y ago

How do you reconcile this with the declining popularity of desktop and laptop computers, and the increase of smartphones, tablets, and other keyboardless touchscreen devices? I haven't noticed an increase in keyboarding skills either, which are absolutely essential to use a CLI well. I wish CLIs would become more popular amongst the general population, but it seems GUIs (which are also becoming "flatter" and less discoverable, ironically enough) have taken over completely for almost everyone.

stagas 11y ago
Voice recognition? So you might say, the future of UI is saying what you want to happen, either by typing it or speaking it outloud.
- tlarkworthy 11y ago
  Doesn't work well in an office though
- nommm-nommm 11y ago
  How many people actually prefer the "tell me why you called?" phone menus over "press 1 for billing" phone menus?
cobweb 11y ago
I've had a laptop with a broken keyboard, that I tried to drive with a pointer. And a system without a mouse driven with a keyboard. I was surprised how much I could do with the former. I like the terminal, and I am also a reasonable touch typist. I don't particularly enjoy typing though. I've tried a few different keyboards. And I _do_ get the power of the CLI. But I think it's a barrier to computer input. And it's a barrier to free conversation. Check Youtube comments for example. I think some of the terseness (think Twitter) results as a result of text entry being laborious. I'm not familiar with using a tablet - and I always feel somewhat restricted and impotent when using mobile devices, which I figure others feel when using a keyboard. OSs could make text entry far better and centralise it. Portable dictionaries and shortcuts for example. Yeah you can do that by keeping shell scripts on a remote, but it all feels a bit hodge podge. Jumping from one CLI to another, different apps, etc can feel nasty. And I'm personally not happy putting my primary CLI in a cloud based SILO.

meshko 11y ago

1) argue that non-power uses will love the text-based interfaces 2) support your claim with a bunch of examples from software development workflows. Sigh.

moistgorilla 11y ago
It's not exclusive to slack, for example: twitch chat there are a bunch of text commands that people love to use. When people use emojis and other such things they usually use a text macro. If you've noticed with programs like photoshop and illustrator, it's recommended for novices to learn all of the keyboard shortcuts. If anything this points to the future of UI being a combination of text and point and click.
- hitekker 11y ago
  ... and touch?
- shortstuffsushi 11y ago
  I would argue that designers (and probably most twitch users) are still quite a bit closer to power users than the average user.
- onion2k 11y ago
  It's not exclusive to slack, for example: twitch chat there are a bunch of text commands that people love to use. People who use Twitch a lot love to use them. People who don't use Twitch much don't bother. This backs up the argument that power users like macros. When people use emojis and other such things they usually use a text macro. True, but that might be because PC keyboards don't have emoji. There's no other option. People certainly don't use a macro on mobile; they use a an emoji keyboard because that's what they prefer. If you've noticed with programs like photoshop and illustrator, it's recommended for novices to learn all of the keyboard shortcuts. There's an assumption when you're learning something with the end goal of understanding that application that you're on the first steps to becoming an expert (aka power user). If someone is only learning how to achieve a single end result they don't start with the shortcuts. For example, someone who just wants to learn how to resize and crop images in Photoshop just learns the two or three features they're going to use and then they stop. I don't know very many people outside of the software industry who are happy with a command line interface, and even fewer who're happy with macros on a command line. Also, if Partyline is the future, then I don't like it. The two examples in the article are inconsistent; /partyline create Signup endpoint is 500'ing label:bug vs /partyline create:task Write about the future of text-based interfaces Why is the first one using a "create" verb with a "bug" label and the second using a "create:task" verb? Why not "create:bug" in the first one, or "label:task" in the second?

6d0debc071 11y ago

One of the huge limitations for text based interfaces is the same as the elephant in the room for people starting programming, especially when they start dealing with others libraries/modules: It's not easily discoverable if you don't know what to look for - there's no intuition. A GUI, at least one that's reasonably well-designed, you can play around in and learn fairly quickly. Having seen the pain of many users even when trying to dig down through a GUI they're unfamiliar with, I think that while text based interface are often more powerful there's a long way to go before they're more popular.

1971genocide 11y ago

Text is good for efficiency. Not for learning. When I see a UI of an app - I can at one instant see all the possible things that can be done using it. text starts becoming a problem when their is a combinatronical explosion in what you can do with your app. I cannot imagine Photoshop, Maya or After Effects to be text based. Its a fairly interesting computer science question to me.

dllthomas 11y ago
"I cannot imagine Photoshop [...] to be text based." ImageMagick is amazing. There are certainly tasks for which the interface is more awkward than Photoshop (or GIMP), but there are tasks for which the opposite is true. For instance, I was easily able to write a script for "take a screenshot, detect where the variably-sized error message box appears within it and crop to it".
detaro 11y ago
Maya at least has strong scripting support from what I've heard. Similarly Blender. Which IMHO is a great way: have a GUI, but also have a scriptable console.
miguelrochefort 11y ago
It should be the job of the operating system to expose a coherent and flexible set of tools, features, and UI paradigms that people can use across many different use-cases (nowadays called "apps"). Copy and Paste, although poor operators in retrospect, is such an example. Undo is an other, much better one. I firmly believe that we could reduce or eliminate most application-specific commands by increasing the standard set provided by the OS. Some kind of semantic primes that could be composed into anything. A new UI language if you will.
deleted 11y ago
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ddingus 11y ago
The MEL language is a huge part of MAYA, and it's the guts that do lots of the work. Part of the magic of MAYA is the killer GUI for making models, etc... The real heavy lifting comes from the tight integration between MEL and that GUI, which permits all sorts of things to be made and then quickly manipulated using the SAME MAYA GUI.

miguelrochefort 11y ago

This is an ad for Partyline. The thesis, sadly, is poorly demonstrated. This should have been called "The present of UI input is text for this particular use case". Text (or speech) as an input method is alright when you know exactly what you want. However, this is not a very good exploration interface, where you need to interact with things that are presented in a 2D/3D space. Text also isn't very expressive when it comes to consuming content. The future of UI, in most cases, is no UI. Let some AI study and understand you, and let it make decisions on your behalf.

meerita 11y ago
I thought exactly the same. There are poor examples and for a strong title there is little substance.
ygra 11y ago
Wolfram Alpha suffers a bit from that, I think: You can query a great lot of things but for many of them it requires you to a) know about that you can query that, b) knowing how to query for that, c) how to give options, parameters. The natural language interface sounds great and makes for awesome demos (like »Wow, they can actually understand that?«), but it's horrible for discoverability, especially in cases where you can try five different ways of saying the same thing but only the sixth would actually yield a result.
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  The shortcomings of natural language interfaces are obvious, and I cannot understand why so many people believe it to be the future. Humanity needs a formal language, which requires formal thinking. Ambiguity is not a problem when a language is used to browse, explore and clarify thoughts, but this kind of interaction needs to be feedback-driven. You can't just input an ambiguous natural language query and expects accurate results. However, you can start with an ambiguous natural language query, and quickly make it into a formal one thanks to smart auto-completion. Only when the query reach a formal threshold should it be executed.

hberg 11y ago

Sorry, I don't buy the premise. The future of UI (for the general public) is probably voice-based like "Hey Siri/Google/etc, I'd like a sandwich" and a sandwich is ordered and delivered to you. "Tweet 'Who's down for a sandwich party?'" and a tweet is tweeted. Whenever I hear or read someone argue that "command line is the future" I think of my dad; barely able to make a bookmark in a browser and not really knowing how folders work. And he's been using a Mac for decades.

code_duck 11y ago
Typing to Siri or Google is essentially a command line interface.

wmeredith 11y ago

No way. I've been designing and coding interfaces for 10 years, and time after time one of the biggest constraints for what is on/off the screen is the user's memory. Want to know why the command line is hard for plebs? It's because they don't know what the options are. They don't even know what they don't know. The whole point of a GUI is to convey the possibilities. Show users a menu and they get to pick something. This isn't going to change anytime soon. At least not until terminal commands are taught in school alongside the alphabet and multiplication tables.

miguelrochefort 11y ago
This simply is an artifact of the original design of CLI. You start by writing the command or function, and then you provide parameters or arguments. The order in which these things are provided leads to poor discoverability. Instead of starting with the command, we should start with an argument. Given a "thing" (that likely exists in your UI), such as a file, a song, a person, a chunk of text, show me the list of commands that accept it as a parameter. You'll quickly discover that a chunk of text can be passed to functions such as "tweet", "copy to clipboard", "create memo", "search on Google", "translate". Congratulations, you just invented the contextual menu, which people have been using for decades. "Things" are easy to discover; you can see them. Commands that interact with them, are not as easy to discover; you can't see them. Let people touch or name things (with or without a query language), and once they grabbed the instance they care about, show them what can be done with it. It's that simple. Before: > /tweet "some random thoughts" // where you had to know 'tweet' existed as a command After: > "some random thoughts" -> tweet // where 'tweet' was auto-suggested, along with 'search', 'translate', 'copy', etc.
- seagreen 11y ago
  This is brilliant. Do you have suggestions for where I can go to read more about this idea?
  - mitchtbaum 11y ago
    This question seems to point in this direction of changing our shell syntax from `vo` to `ov`, based on Jef Raskin's Humane Interface http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/48051/how-to-extend-the-noun-verb-paradigm-to-multiple-nouns http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/48051/how-to-extend-th... .. I imagine pluggable shell grammars would allow open ended exploration this way.

xiaq 11y ago

The Anti-Mac Interface (http://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/ http://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/) argues for the advantage of text over GUI in a more vivid way: > The see-and-point principle states that users interact with the computer by pointing at the objects they can see on the screen. It's as if we have thrown away a million years of evolution, lost our facility with expressive language, and been reduced to pointing at objects in the immediate environment. Mouse buttons and modifier keys give us a vocabulary equivalent to a few different grunts. We have lost all the power of language, and can no longer talk about objects that are not immediately visible (all files more than one week old), objects that don't exist yet (future messages from my boss), or unknown objects (any guides to restaurants in Boston).

sperling75 11y ago

Text as UI success I believe is tied to how connected the related task is to the messaging tool you are in and how easy the platform makes it for the user. There are a number of tasks that could be good text candidates in a slack interface such as project management, time calendaring, tools used by the slack team. I think it's silly to jump to the conclusion that text is the future of ui. I would agree that text is making a come back for relevant tasks within popular messaging tools.

striking 11y ago

Text is good, but not for everything. How would you represent a tree or graph data structure in text to a human and let them manipulate it? I understand that this works for some things. A command-line interface is good for giving commands! Yet using it to paint is a lot harder. Essentially, text interfaces are good at manipulating text. As a software developer you're often manipulating only text. So you think text interfaces are good, always. This is a syllogistic fallacy.

jameshart 11y ago
As a software developer, you're actually manipulating abstract concepts about the future movement of data over time. The best way we've come up to do that is to describe those concepts using textual languages, and then build ourselves tools for manipulating text in the belief that that gets us closer to manipulating those concepts. This has the effect that we actively reject some really good tools as being 'unsuitable for programming' because they are hard to work with with our text based tools. I think there's a lesson in both directions here: the fact that often the kinds of tools software developers use could actually be of use in some other domain (lawyers could get a lot of benefit out of distributed version control and markup languages, for example), but also software developers can sometimes get caught up in text editors and command lines and forget that sometimes a nice graphical visualization or interaction is really helpful.
wtbob 11y ago
> How would you represent a tree or graph data structure in text to a human and let them manipulate it? Tree: '(root (left (left-left left-right)) (right (right-left right-right))) Graph: '(graph (#1=node1 #2=node2) (#2# #3=node3) (#3# #1#)) Solved problems since at least the early 90s. > Yet using it to paint is a lot harder. Sure, but drawing is only one activity among many possible activities. > As a software developer you're often manipulating only text. I think that's true for most users: they are reading articles (text); writing comments (text); sending social updates (rich text); watching videos (not text); playing games (not text, but may have textual content, e.g. in-game chat).
- swhipple 11y ago

osetinsky 11y ago

I ask myself this question as it pertains to the future of music. Digital Audio Workstations such as Ableton Live and Logic Pro dominate the scene when it comes to making music with a computer (at least in pop music), and companies such as Splice are trying to create collaborative networks around them. Text based interfaces and audio programming languages such as SuperCollider open up a whole new world of musical creativity, and would lend themselves to collaboration (IMO) better than GUI based ones. The obvious hurdle for people is learning how to create things/music/art with text. https://supercollider.github.io/ https://supercollider.github.io/ http://sccode.org/ http://sccode.org/ music written with supercollider: https://open.spotify.com/track/4VecDB1uhp44posWgt85yN https://open.spotify.com/track/4VecDB1uhp44posWgt85yN

Kiro 11y ago

I don't think there's any substance in this claim. The examples are very niched.

johansch 11y ago
The whole post is just a thinly masked ad...

nthnb 11y ago

In 2007 Donald Norman wrote a piece on command-line interfaces that's pretty cogent: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ui_breakthroughcomma.html http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ui_breakthroughcomma.html Text UI is a great way to hide complexity but difficult to teach and form habits around. The learning curve is steep and probably something we need to invest more in because "have you read the man page" isn't gonna cut it for most.

ddingus 11y ago

I personally would frame this as "the console" and it's the place where one can input text in the interface, and it may well be a secondary, external channel apart from the main or primary GUI. All that has been done before. It should be done more.

bithush 11y ago

When I first used Cortana as part of Windows 10 I was quite disappointed when I found out it lacked quick commands like this. Sure it has some understanding of what is written such as "remind me to call Jim at 2pm" but it is very limited. I was hoping I would be able to things like the following - * backup Fizz Buzz project (and have it intelligently backup the Fizz Buss Visual Studio project to a default location) * open Fizz Buzz issue 131 (and have it open a browser to the github issue tracker to the correct issue #) * email the Fizz Buzz project plan to Jim (you can *kind of* do this but it hardly ever works as you would want) * open Fizz Buzz todo.txt when I next login * copy the Fizz Buzz project plan to my Dropbox projects folder You know things that I will otherwise need to open the command prompt for or do some mundane UI task. Sure some of these things will require applications have such support but from what I can tell Cortana offers no real way to do this other than integrating with the Windows search service. Considering most (all?) of these things could be done with PowerShell cmdlets it is annoying there is no way to script Cortana via PowerShell in such a way. Maybe one day.

shortstuffsushi 11y ago
A lot of those things seem like commands specific to your environment though (read: things someone would have to develop out). Does Cortana offer some sort of API allowing you to add additional "commands" that she understands? That would be pretty neat.
- bithush 11y ago
  I checked a few months ago but there was nothing specifically for desktop apps only universal ones and even then they were mostly voice-oriented things so you can "plug in to Bing". Ugh. As far as I can tell it is not [yet?] possible to integrate features from a classic Win32 application into Cortana to do things like I listed. Shame as that would have been very cool. My examples are very specific to my domain for sure but they were just some examples for my use, the general concept of using Cortana as an actual digital assistant to automate/speedup boring and often done tasks.
dingo_bat 11y ago

cubano 11y ago

Multi-line chat in BBS's in the 1980s used slash-commands such as these in chat apps...I'm sure I'm not the only one here old enough to remember those. Sigh...like so many other things, what is old is new again. Forcing people used to touch interaction with their phones to grok command line UX seems more like wishful thinking then the Next Thing.

Albright 11y ago
Yep. Slack is a pretty poor re-implementation of IRC, and I'm pretty bummed both my previous and my current company forced me to use it. If we're going to go this route, let's at least use something not so patronizing and infantile, like HipChat. And I'm pretty sick of all these "Slack is going to change/has changed THE WORLD!!!" articles in general.
- mbrock 11y ago
  You don't love it when software soothes you during loading screens with cuddly inspirational messages?

potatohead00 11y ago

A much more interesting discussion of this topic http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html

duaneb 11y ago

Slack is not text. Slack is an engine designed to provide multimedia in specific, arbitrary formats. The fact that you can modify things by typing text does not make an argument that the future of UI is text.... maybe event streams and highly leverage-able tools, but that's not intrinsic to text.

pjmlp 11y ago

The future is the Xerox PARC paradigm, not AT&T.

neilni 11y ago

Isn't this called ChatOps? Slack acts as an hub for all the api wrappers. Ex: you should be able to type commands that execute on behave of you rather than ssh into your machine to type the same command. The title should read the future of DevOps is chat. UI is a different topic

LukeB42 11y ago

Fortunately I've just released an ncurses wrapper that deals in printing strings exactly how they're formatted. To update the view call update_content(0,"Some\nLines.") on the appropriate Pane object. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/window https://pypi.python.org/pypi/window

tim333 11y ago

Mildly off topic but re >In the past, we thought the future of computing would look complicated: lots of buttons, multiple screens, and crazy interfaces. ... followed by a shot of the 1960's Star Trek ship's deck, then saying we're headed for command lines instead. Since 50 years have passed since that set was designed I thought I'd google how designs have changed. Here's the space shuttle http://cdn.visualnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Discovery_Flight_Deck_5.jpg http://cdn.visualnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Discove... and here's a modern ship http://www.motorship.com/__data/assets/image/0020/705404/THE-VIEW-FROM-THE-BRIDGE.jpg http://www.motorship.com/__data/assets/image/0020/705404/THE... Still looks more like lots of buttons, multiple screens, and crazy interfaces than command line to me. Still give it another half century.

brudgers 11y ago

Regardless of whether the author is right, it's worth thinking about because it may well be the case that humans have a better affinity for graphic representations of spoken language than for pictorial representations of things in the world. Ordinary people type web addresses into browsers...or heaven forfend, at least "microsoft" into their Google toolbar for IE8. There's a point at which information redundancy is overwhelming even for people who don't care about information theory or how the web works or anything else. The WIMP interface was a great innovation. But it was built for a time when women were in the typing pool, entrepreneurs were called "businessmen" and managers were afraid of catching keyboard kooties. The meteor hit and CEO's type their own correspondence and answer phone calls on their direct line [which lives in their pocket]. There's a case [and a reasonable counter case] to be made that WIMP was the installation program for widespread computing. Once the important system is up and running it can be discarded. The degree to which this is plausible correlates to the inverse to which one sees WIMP as an end in itself. Yesterday, it was rounded corners on shiny buttons, today it's flat sharp corners. In the interim, people have learned from experience that pixels can't cut human fingers. A buggy whip industry would count this as progress.

codingdave 11y ago

The headline does not match the article. The article raves about one particular feature on Slack, then shows that their tool works well with it. This is not an article about UI. This is marketing. Even worse, it is marketing that failed -- all it has done here is invoke disagreement from a tech community.

llamataboot 11y ago
Well, it did get an add for Partyline on the frontpage of HN. Not sure that's failing, even if people disagree with your premise.

digi_owl 11y ago

Jef Raskin[0]'s Archy[1] anyone? [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy

singold 11y ago

If the future of interfaces is foing to be text, i think it will be more because minecraft playing children than slack users, just my 2c

avodonosov 11y ago

I share this view and even use this idea in some of my projects (for example at http://testsheet.biz http://testsheet.biz the test tree is edited in a plain text form. This allows to edit several tree nodes at once, including the whole tree; and also to quickly move groups of tests around by copy/paste; to introduce new nodes quickly. So, much quicker and easier that in any tree widget). Together with intelligent completion (similar to programming environments) text UI could in many cases be significantly more convenient than widgets for mouse. And it can be much cheaper develop.

copsarebastards 11y ago

The future of Slack is that they'll do what every other chat application has done in the past 2 decades: they keep "innovating" on a solved problem, add "features" that get in people's way to the point that it becomes unusable and people switch to the new "disrupting chat technology". It happened to HipChat before Slack and I doubt Slack will break the cycle. Given that I don't think I'll be looking to Slack as "the future of UI".

tiger10guy 11y ago

https://vimeo.com/115154289 https://vimeo.com/115154289

spo81rty 11y ago

I use slack everyday. I didn't know it did any of the stuff mentioned in this article. That's the problem command line.

d08ble 11y ago

Future is the matrix. Animation CPU said, that text is form, all user manipulations will be in native form - voice, touch, think, where text is local case. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubNfWarTawI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubNfWarTawI - how UI replication will be used in the matrix http://acpul.tumblr.com/ http://acpul.tumblr.com/

mschuster91 11y ago

Bit-related sidenote: Does anyone know a way to position the cursor inside a terminal running bash when editing a command except navigating with the left/right arrow keys? This is by far the thing that eats the most time when I'm working on the commandline.

paulddraper 11y ago

The future of UI is text....specifically Hypertext Markup Language.

ranjith7393 11y ago

move to top

SZJX 11y ago

A good title to promote your product, sure, but there's little substance or truth in the claim really.